"<Blank> concluded the interview by stating that even though he does not consider Mr. Jobs to be a friend, he (Mr. Jobs) possesses the qualities to assume a high level political position. It was <blank>'s opinion that honesty and integrity are not required qualities to hold such a position."
"He characterized Mr Jobs as a deceptive individual who is not completely forthright and honest. He stated that Mr. Jobs will twist the truth and distort reality in order to achieve his goals."
It's funny to see the famed reality distortion field, so often mentioned in terms of admiration of salesmanship and persuasiveness, with so many entrepreneurs attempting to emulate it, appear in an actual FBI file as some sort of evidence of potential criminality or unfitness for public service.
Who knows, man. He could have solved world peace, cured aids and cancer, gone back in time and killed Hitler.
Instead, this happened.
I guess we'll never know...
That's what all of the documents seem to be from. To be clear, the FBI wasn't keeping tabs on Jobs because they thought he was up to no good, it was the standard background check they do when someone is being considered for a high level government position.
Now the speculation starts as to who the people were that the FBI interviewed.
He was being considered to an appointment to the export council. Lots of testimonies about his out of wedlock child, drug use, and dishonesty. For and against. The FBI concludes in support of Jobs.
Also, in 1985 he received blackmail for one million dollars or 4 bombs. It's right at the end.
And why would you ever ever release information on vetting ok Steve is dead but all the people who where interviewed are not and neither are Steves family.
Would you like to read a recently deceased loved ones warts and all developed vetting report - what public interest is served by this.
It is also open to abuse by muck raking hacks I sure Guido Fawlks would love to see the files on Polly Toynbees (Guardian journalist) dad (who was best mates with Burgess - one of the cambridge spy ring)
The purpose is to enable government transparency, and since the taxpayers paid for that information to be gathered, they deserve to see what their government servants did in their name.
While I'm generally in favor of FOI, the public interest of disclosure needs to be weighed against the impact on both privacy and the integrity of the security vetting process (strong privacy encourages frank comments). In this case the benefit of disclosure is almost entirely to help us gossip about a celebrity so I feel the disclosure is not warranted.
Voted down Jesus H Crist! From the information this isn't how much some litte town in some fly over state spent of running the dog catching service.
Its the results of a TS Clearance Vetting FFS. Do you think people are going to be open about some one if potentialy its going to be vomited over the internets whilst they are still alive.
So a little more information from this document about the Presidential Appointment that was being considered:
The president was George Bush senior, and the appointment was "President's Export Council" (not Senate-confirmable) - and this was happening while he was President of NeXT.
Jobs was aware of the possibility and indeed had filled in his details on the "Questionnaire For Sensitive Positions" for it.
He stated that he had not used or dealt illegal drugs in the past five years (of interest due to his speaking in favour of LSD).
In the interview with the FBI Jobs also stated that "during the period of approximately 1970-1974 he experimented with marijuana, hashish and lsd. This was during high school and college and he mostly used the substances by himself." p.48
I love the page after that where they say he was "not a member of the communist party." Even for the government that seems not even worth writing down.
"On February 25, 1991, <redacted> Security Clerk, Status and Inquiry Branch, DISCO, Columbus, Ohio, was personally contacted and she advised she located the following security clearance in their files identifiable with the appointee, STEVEN PAUL JOBS, SSAN: 549-94-3295:
Top Secret clearance dated November 3, 1988, based on a Background Investigation by the Defense Investigative Service dated August 30, 1988. This clearance terminated July 31, 1990, and the employing agency is:
People often assume that clearance is only given out in rare circumstances. It's surprising how easy it is to be told you need it and often when you're dealing with certain agencies it's easier for them to make sure you get it so that if they say the wrong thing then they're covered by your arrangements too.
"He belonged to no organizations other than the New York Athletic Club however he had never been in the New York Athletic Club and knew nothing with regard to their membership policies."
Why was he a member of the New York Athletic Club? Did someone give him a membership as a gift?
(At the time, he did own an apartment at 146 Central Park West in New York City. [Edit: I didn't know that either. It was stated in the paragraph directly above the one mentioning the NY Athletic Club.])
The building he had a flat in is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_San_Remo -- a rather exclusive place even as NYC goes and he eventually sold it to U2's Bono for $15 million.
Maybe being allowed to buy a flat in there and membership of the club are somehow connected (the club seems to be an exclusive, expensive invite-only gentlemens' club)
My favourite snippet: "Several individuals questioned Mr. Jobs' honesty stating that Mr. Jobs will twist and distort reality in order to achieve his goals."
So far my favorite: "He added that the Appointee lives within his means financially, however, his means are considerable and the Appointee is worth at least 100 million dollars."
It's easy to live within your means if you're worth 100 million dollars I guess. Unless you are Elton John or Nicolas Cage.
Several double-agents & spies were caught by living beyond their means, such as buying yachts etc. It was pretty obvious they had a second source of income, presumably from illicit activity.
Curiously enough it's more difficult than you'd think. According to Sports Illustrated, within five years of retirement 60% of NBA players go bankrupt (although I'm not sure how reliable the source is).
Considering the brevity of an NBA career (4.7 years or so according to a few Googled sources), and at best the mixed bag of financial qualifications of players, this doesn't surprise me much.
Generalizing somewhat: ghetto kid -> scholarship college athlete with a broad academic pass -> pro -> out on the street.
Yes, there is a somewhat broader range of experiences than just that. Still: sports stars generally burn bright, but very briefly.
When you have a hundred extended relatives reaching out for help, combined with scam artists trying to talk you into "investments", it's easy to go broke.
It's also damn easy to waste money at any scale simply due to your own financial demeanor. I waste a lot of money on $50-$500 gadgets because that amount of money doesn't mean much to me. I'm not very financially responsible, though I'm not irresponsible either.
If I made ten times what I do, I'd probably be buying $500-$5000 gadgets just as frequently. If $100k didn't mean much to me then I'd probably buy a Tesla. If $20M didn't mean much to me then I might become a space tourist.
A more financially responsible person than myself would be likely to remain more responsible as they scale up, and a less responsible person would likely remain less responsible.
This is outstanding reporting requesting and staying on the request for information, and it's a fascinating look at Jobs and the government process of vetting White House appointments in 1991.
Note that they are still obsessed with the idea of anyone belonging to or contributing to the Communist Party and even checked if had relatives in foreign countries who might have been Communists (they couldn't find any).
I also particularly like the comments from people who knew him in the background check documents--not always a flattering picture, that's for sure (but we knew that).
One of my favorite tidbits from "The Best And The Brightest" is that Dean Rusk, President Kennedy's nominee for Secretary of State, had to fill out a security questionnaire like this one, and to the question, "Have any of your relatives been part of an organization whose purpose was to subvert the government of the United States?" he answered "yes" because both his grandfathers had fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War.
When I was applying for permanent residency in 2003, this question also came up as part of my interview. I had briefly been a member of a small radical left organization in Canada, back when I was 18 or so - and since I didn't know how in-depth the background check would be, I decided it'd be best to disclose it.
Paraphrasing from memory:
Interviewer: "So, tell me about this thing."
Me: "Stupid kid stuff. I was in college."
Interviewer: "So you don't believe this stuff any more?"
Me: "No, I've made my peace with capitalism."
And that was that.
I came away with the impression that (at least for people from countries lacking a near-term history of guerrilla warfare) this was largely a formality.
To expand on liber8's point, the "red scare" and such seems funny and unreasonable now, but it's important to remember that during the cold war, the USA and the Soviet Union were very much enemies.
To put it in another way, would we think the FBI was out-of-bounds today if background checks today included determining if the person being vetted (or their family members) were associated with a terrorist organization? As much as most of us would consider the "terrorism" threat overblown, we'd accuse the FBI of gross negligence if an Al-Qaeda operative made it into a position in the US government.
It's not apparent these days with rose-coloured hindsight glasses, but when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, there was a very palpable fear that there would be a nuclear war, regardless of actual risk. Certainly there was in the west, a fear that 'those crazy russians' would start something because of ideology.
A russian friend of mine says the same was not true in Russia. They were aware of the cold war, obviously, but 'knew' that their leaders, no matter how incompetant or corrupt, would never initiate the exchange.
The trouble is that "terrorism" inherently contains violence, whereas "communism" can be completely peaceful and nice. Terrorist organizations are always bad. Communist organizations can be completely benign, and were generally considered bad purely by association.
To put it slightly differently, it's not like asking if someone is associated with a terrorist organization, but more like asking if someone is associated with a Muslim organization.
"Communism" as a general philosophy may not be violent, but if you look in the Communist Manifesto, and the entity which calls itself the Communist Party, the stuff they're concerned about - advocating "armed overthrow of the US government" - was a present and real threat.
Not that I'd care to throw out a blanket justification for any and all anti-Communist measures out there, mind you. But it's possible to downplay the threat excessively too.
Perhaps some forms of Anarcho-socialism could be argued to be both completely nonviolent (peaceful) and voluntary (nice). However any form of Communism calling for the abolition of capitalism, which asserts that others do not have the right to continue asserting claims to private ownership of capital independently, most certainly cannot be considered either.
Yes, that was my argument. I believe it stands until a semantic context for "completely peaceful and nice" can be proposed that is disjoint in meaning from "nonviolent and voluntary".
It seems so strange now, but remember, the Berlin wall only fell in November 1989. Even in 1991, the communist threat was still very much on people's minds.
Also, the people in charge of the FBI are old, and likely to have been the kind of people obsessing over this kind of stuff back in the day (during the cold war).
> Note that they are still obsessed with the idea of anyone belonging to or contributing to the Communist Party and even checked if had relatives in foreign countries who might have been Communists (they couldn't find any).
Their continued focus upon past drug use is also anachronistic. I have not yet read the the document all the way thought, but so far they have mentioned it no fewer than a dozen times.
The FBI's priorities seem to be... dated. I wonder if they are still thus.
They're looking for aberrant things that will lead them to compromising information. You get some leeway for the sins of the past -- provided that you disclose.
If you state that you don't abuse alcohol or use drugs, but individuals associated with you state otherwise, that will merit additional investigation. If you committed a crime and lied about it, what else did you do? Sell drugs? Grow weed in your apartment? Hang out with drug dealers?
Anachronistic or not, using drugs is illegal. If you're hiding some dark secret, that can be used to coerce or otherwise compromise you, it's relevant.
Do you want the US representative to some trade organization selling the country out, because he doesn't want someone to find out that did something stupid in his 20s?
> Do you want the US representative to some trade organization selling the country out, because he doesn't want someone to find out that did something stupid in his 20s?
No, I'd much rather they do it for a fist-full of money.
Maybe, but the whole point of these interviews are to try to determine how susceptible a person is to being "turned", that is, blackmailed/bribed/forced against their will to working against US interests.
Maybe the FBI is being stodgy, but if someone has been addicted to certain illegal drugs (I know, I know, use doesn't mean addiction) that's one additional angle an "enemy" could use to exploit this person.
I was told by the holder of a Secret clearance here in Aus that the interviews about background were largely about exposing potential blackmail levers and less about moral transgressions.
He also mentioned three general levels of clearance - classified, secret negative, secret positive. Negative is closer to a background check in style. Positive is the exhaustive fine-toothed comb.
Or even if they were particularly averse to friends/family members/church members/etc finding out about their use. I've known people who aggressively hid their (regular) weed smoking from their spouses. (Yeah, not exactly an optimal relationship, but it definitely happens...)
I don't know how to check this myself, but are the redactions flattened, i.e. so they cannot be removed, or are they just shapes on a another layer drawn over the relevant areas, i.e. is the redacted data still recoverable by editing the pdf?
It wouldn't be the first time a "redaction" turned out to be no more than a mere obfuscation in practise.
They are flattened: The FBI prints out files, redacts them, and then scans them back in. A number of federal agencies do this, really making it a pain to search through documents.
You can upload the PDF to Google Docs, which will OCR it and make the document searchable. This particular PDF, however, is rejected because it's more than 2MB :(
We're looking to build quality OCR into MuckRock so every document gets it, but it's surprisingly either a) technically difficult or b) financially expensive, choose one.
That's really cool, thanks. But I don't think it includes OCR. The best FOSS OCR out there is Tesseract, which we use through DocumentCloud, but it still leaves a lot to be desired compared to commercial solutions.
What do you consider expensive? Transym is really good and not too expensive (disclosure: they are a partner of my company -- but I am endorsing them on that basis)
£60.00 doesn't sound bad. We'd need it to fit into our automated workflow and be able to handle hundreds of pages at a time, and occasionally 1k+ page documents, and stuff from Nuance we'd looked at would have cost $4k or more a year, plus charge per page which is a deal killer. This might be a good fit ... thanks!
Yes. Accidentally leaking information makes it harder for the FBI to gather information in the future, so they ensure that they are very careful when disclosing information. In this case, it makes the information harder to search, but that's why we pay journalists to read the released documents and summarize them for us.
The most interesting thing in these documents is among the last few pages which appear to be fingerprints (presumably SJ's) lifted from a telephone receiver at SFO. I wonder why? Can't just ask the guy for his prints?
EDIT: it appears from further reading that they're related to a bomb threat involving him at SFO. They're labeled as "misc notes on extortion at Apple."
I enjoyed reading this. Sometimes I watch too many cop shows and think that I want to become a detective. Then I read reports like this, and realize that 99% of police work is producing reports like this one. You may get to interview the occasional reference, but you're probably not going to be getting into many gunfights.
I feel mislead by fictional television programs :)
Watch The Wire. Most realistic portrayal of police work I've ever seen. Lots of watching suspects and gathering string, putting the pieces of the puzzle together slowly over a season of television, dealing with disfunctional organizations and a realistically low number of gunfights.
I love The Wire. I like how it shows the boring parts in addition to the exciting parts, but let's be honest, there is a lot more field work than desk work. The Wire does not convince me that being a detective would be mostly boring.
Is it really realistic though? The Wire seems to portray only cases that are relevant to the big picture plot, and they always seem to solve them in the end.
The guy was embedded with the real baltimore homicide squad for two years or something in the 80s. Read his book, Homicide, for a more realistic depiction of the monotonous life of a police department.
The wire is still realistic, because it specifically follows a team doing a large drug investigation, rather than the general work of the dept. In the book, there are a lot more misc. trails that go cold, like you describe.
And programming (at least for some of us :p) is exactly the opposite--it's usually portrayed as dry and relatively boring, like clerk work, but in reality is actually pretty awesome.
As a third year law student and fairly experienced web programmer, I feel like I can maybe weigh in on this: What seems boring to one person is the other person's reason to live! I'm surprised by how thrilled many lawyers are with their practice areas (that I find boring) but they probably feel the same about the areas I've found most interesting in law.
Both are filled with intellectual challenge. People who like problems are attracted to each. Although people who like problems and money might be more attracted to law!
Pg 43- "[REDACTED] commented that, although he does not consider Mr. Jobs to be a friend at this time, he considers Mr. Jobs to be a successful individual because he can delegate tasks to individuals."
The confusing thing about this lot is the redundancy. They got at least 15 people to make statements, but it looks like multiple SA's interviewed the same people and they all said pretty much the same thing (with the exception of the one dude who thought integrity and honesty weren't prerequisites for a job in the government). Does this mean all of these people had multiple visits from different field agents? That must have been incredibly tiresome. And is there some kind of special cut'n'paste they do to end up with practically the same language in every report? Or are they just recycling the same information over and over.
Well if someone changes their story, that's suspicious. Some people feel intimidated or trusting or shy or outspoken on different days, when approached by different agents.
As to character, this is far more revealing than that sanctioned bio. I found the bio to be biased: the author never failed to use "genius" but as far for negative qualities, they were brushed aside.
Roughly 40 interviews in this pdf, from close associates, friends, classmates, co-workers, and industry colleagues. Not for profit; only meant to give an accurate depiction. And people seem to have been very honest also; maybe the interviewer being the FBI and probably confidentiality promised as well. I find roughly 60% of the people say he's morally and ethically questionable.
I'm referring to the wording. The author never hesitates to exclaim genius compliments, but equally opinionated proclamations about the negative aspects of his character not proclaimed. Facts are stated, but there are no proclamations describing what type of person that means SJ to be.
No he was put in charge of the advanced research division. They basically stripped him of all managerial duties without firing him. When presented with his new position and title he was like, "F it, I'm outta here!"
Firing a company founder is probably the last thing any publicly traded would do. It's just not done. You'd have sympathetic stockholders rioting, the neutral ones now pissed at you, and every last member of the board fired as well.
I didn't mean to imply its never done, just that when a founder is fired it tends to be for criminal reasons (ie, John Delorean). In this case, it looks like a pure power play. Tucci had the board backing him and Greene had the senior executives. In the end Tucci won.
"When Ms. Greene’s firing was announced to investors the next morning, VMware’s shares plunged 24 percent, and the high-flying company was thrown into a tailspin from which it has yet to recover."[1]
Since her departure it looks like VMWare has changed from an engineering driven company to acquisitions driven.
According to Sculley, he was quite sincere that he wanted Jobs to run the advanced research division. He interpreted it as a demotion, quit, then told the interviewers he was fired.
The documents toward the end are interesting. At first I thought, "wtf they sent out field agents to dust for his fingerprints?" But a few documents later and apparently he and a couple others at Apple where victims of a bomb threat and the fingerprints where of the suspect. Haven't finished reading Isaacson's book so not sure if this was in there. Otherwise (from my cursory read) nothing else was new or unexpected.
Q20: Are Social Security numbers reused after a person dies?
A: No. We do not reassign a Social Security number (SSN) after the number holder's death. Even though we have issued over 453 million SSNs so far, and we assign about 5 and one-half million new numbers a year, the current numbering system will provide us with enough new numbers for several generations into the future with no changes in the numbering system.
--
One would assume that eventually all 999,999,999 numbers would be allocated and they'd have to either add a digit or start reusing them.
Hopefully by then people will have realized that a social security number isn't a great way of identifying a person, so it won't be that relevant anyway.
<BLANK> Described as a "former hippie" had at one time run an apple orchard in Portland, Oregon, in partnership with Steve Jobs.... Jobs was at one time part owner <redacted> of Timerland in Oregon, which included a mine.
Wow, interesting. A background check was initiated by the White House in 1991, since Jobs was being considered for presidential appointment?? By the elder Bush? or Clinton?
The check brought up a 1984 shareholders lawsuit against Apple.
Clinton wouldn't be in the White House for two years tough, would he have asked the FBI to start a background check almost 2 years before the election?
I think the world was so different then. One of my mentors barely graduated and went straight to Stanford MBA back in the 60's. Sure he had lots of campus leadership. But it seems like ambition got you a lot farther back in the day.
This may be a dumb question but can you request this information on anyone? Like can I request my own info? I imagine it's blank but I'm just curious how that works...
Ya there are some odd questions when applying for green cards in US as well. You would like to think that the communist questions are artifacts, but I doubt they are.
"Are you or have you been a member of the Nazi party/movement"
"Are you or have you been a member of a Communist Organization"
"Have you been charged with or convicted of genocide"
I mean, who wants to get busted for lying to the US government? You don't know how detailed their background check is going to be - or whether they're ever going to do a more detailed one in the future.
I'm still down here almost a decade later, so obviously a 'yes' here isn't an automatic deal-breaker.
It's not illegal to be a member of a communist organisation, or a Nazi, but it is illegal to lie on those forms. Asking those questions is a way of upping the stakes; you either admit you're a commie and they don't let you in, or you lie and you're up on a felony charge for making false statements.
Well, the Communist party is part of the governing coalition here in Uruguay (the president is a former guerrilla fighter), which has caused a lot of problems (top government officials are not cleared to visit the U.S. because of their past).
And the Communist party has a lot of members here.
A Scottish brand of waterproof coat that became a generic name for raincoat is spelled Mackintosh[1]. It could be that the FBI person was being redundant to cover all the spelling bases.
This has a surprisingly (?) large number of errors for an FBI background check. They mistake his position at apple, and even how his name is spelled at several points.
I can't find a number from the SSA regarding how much a billionaire (or millionaire) would receive. But this report states that from 2004-2009 $9B was paid out to millionaires in social security benefits: http://www.coburn.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?a=Files.Serve&...
"In fact, the Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) found that in 2009, 38,217 individuals with an AGI of $1 million or more received more than $1.142 billion in Social Security benefits." That seems to show that those millionaires received ~$30k each/year from social security. There must be a cap in place if true.
The cap is based on the maximum income that is subject to the payroll tax (up to $106,800). Income over that amount does not incur payroll tax and also doesn't contribute to payable social security benefits.
They were listed as duplicate because they were duplicates of the "this entire page of the original document has been redacted per FOIA provisions" form letter.
"<Blank> concluded the interview by stating that even though he does not consider Mr. Jobs to be a friend, he (Mr. Jobs) possesses the qualities to assume a high level political position. It was <blank>'s opinion that honesty and integrity are not required qualities to hold such a position."