J. D. Pendry

Have you ever held a job that required a simple background investigation or a security clearance? For much of my time in the Army, my duties required that I have a top secret security clearance. The special background investigation conducted to get and then maintain a top secret security clearance is quite extensive. One must provide 15 years of personal history consisting of references, credit records, relatives, neighbors, affiliations with organizations, workplaces, schools and you name it - and they are all checked. Each 5 years thereafter, all of the information must be updated and checked again. Your life is an open book and if you try to hide any of that your security clearance is lost and you could face serious criminal charges for hiding it. Some of my military jobs required that I be trusted with critically sensitive national security information. The security clearances, which gave me access to information that certainly would damage our national security if it ended up in the wrong hands, was not as high as a Whitehouse level security clearance.

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Contributed by J D on October 23, 2008 at 11:43 AM in J D Pendry | Permalink

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