I got my TS clearance when I was 18 due to my assignment in the Canadian Armed Forces.
Let me tell you how much of a pain it is to gather 20 years of information when you’re 18 yrs old. I got out of the airforce at 21 and never renewed or needed to renew my clearance but the filling out of forms is a fun memory.
Yep. I remember getting a call, wanting to see why I had left a blank square for “employment” in a certain timeframe. I replied, “Well, I was in pre-kindergarten, I think we can safely say I was unemployed.”
I had a TS-SCI for tha Army. Mostly it wasn’t necessary because mostly I was maintaining proficiency in various bits of field gear (radios, Humvees, rifles & fireworks) and Arabic. Occasionally, though, we’d do some live military radio intercept & translation exercises, the fruits and knowledge of which were pretty obviously not to leave the room. The work was at once fascinating and terribly depressing. Glad to be out of the business, although I do miss playing with the gear.
Had to go through it all to work at Hanford in 1980, since we had to access anyplace on the reservation. What a pain to get. Even at an early age, to have to document every address I’d ever lived at? What about the two years in college in a tipi along the river? Thanks to my mom for saving every letter and envelope I’d ever written home, I passed.
Tip for future applicants. Never, never list sex, drugs and rock and roll as hobbies in the company newsletter. Even as a joke.
My favorite part was the property passes we had to have allowing recording devices, cameras, radios, telescopes and I don’t recall what all, necessary for doing the work we did. It was extensive and everyone was amazed.
I hope to hell they’ve improved security there from what it was then. It looked formidable but was pretty much a joke.
I only wish someone would fill me in on what was going on in the Kunk plant where everyone was accompanied by a personal guard. Heh, I could be spelling that wrong, it was so secret I never saw it in writing.
The resume guidance I got at my last job (which I have followed), was to state: “Cleared for TOP SECRET information by Defense Security Service, based on single scope background investigation completed date.” We were emphatically instructed not to mention any special access programs we may have been briefed to.
I’ve never had SCI access, so I’m not sure what the guidance for that was.
I was once asked by a newbie “Why does <our floor> require an access card for the elevator floor button but none of the other floors do?” My answer: “Everybody on all of the other floors is armed.” :eek:
I haven’t had a clearance of any kind in over a decade; been rather longer than that since I held Top Secret.
What’s SAP/SAR? I had a top secret clearance when I was in grad school working a summer job for a defense contractor. It took the entire summer to get it, and when I did, they let me into the secret room. I was working on a project that they couldn’t tell me what to do, but it was obviously detecting radar sites. They classified me then declassified me the next day. They just wanted to hire me after I graduated, so they felt it was worthwhile to get me the clearance, even though it must have cost a fortune and I ended up not working for them.
SAP - Special Access Program
SAR - Special Access Required
If you have to ask - you don’t get to know what’s going on in that program/room/behind the curtain.
Those are requirements in addition to the basic security clearance.
I had a Confidential (the lowest level) clearance when I was a summer intern at a defense contractor in the early 80s. This was in the day when you got one of those if you had a valid driver’s license. As someone else mentioned. What a device did wasn’t usually classified, just how well it it did it. I saw one classified chart in my three summers there. I was handed a piece of paper on how to label the axes of a graph, filled in the graph and then had to hand back the piece of paper. The graph went into a presentation without labels.
My Dad was a very high level executive in the defense industry. He still has a need to know clearance, as high as it gets. Every five (?) years I am asked to update certain basic information for him and there is potential that they will ask for follow-up which has never happened.
My life and my past and various associates I have known will preclude me from ever getting any kind of clearance but the need will never arise.
Top Secret clearances are re-investigated every five years, so that sounds right. Secret is investigated (I believe) every ten; Confidential, I’m not sure about - it’s a weird “lost classification level” in the areas I’ve worked in.
Every place I’ve worked that indicates clearance level on badges has had, in principle, a badge design indicating that the wearer holds a Confidential clearance - but I’ve never actually seen anybody wearing one. It’s always either TS, Secret, or no clearance at all.
In fact, I can think of exactly one item in my experiences that was classified at the Confidential level, and that was kind of a weird historical anomaly that the program even acknowledged didn’t make sense (corresponding information on related programs was Secret), but wasn’t judged to be worth the cost and effort to reclassify it.
Back then at the place I worked, nearly everyone had the minimum Confidential clearance and had a blue stripe on the bottom of their badge. Secret and TS had a red stripe. “No stripe” was so rare that it would cause a double take. It was usually foreign nationals waiting for their clearance to come through which could take some time.
The company where I work now does some military work but not in my location. Sometimes we will get a visitor from a different facility and they will have a red “S” on their badge which I assume means they have that clearance level.
My understanding is that such information is not to be shared, with the possible exception of sharing with a prospective employer where it would have relevance.