Yeah, it’s probably an exaggeration, I just work around so many Agency, State and Defense people that I was applying that standard.
I know that you can say you have one, but I think the idea is that you shouldn’t say you have one. One of the primary rules of classified information is need-to-know: just because you work at Agency A and have the same clearance as someone at Agency B doesn’t mean you talk about your classified stuff with him, etc. I’ve always thought that need-to-know extends to even the fact of having a clearance. Of course you won’t get tried for treason or anything for admitting to having one, but it just seems a little smarter (IMHO) to avoid volunteering such information.
Do you have Need To Know? 
I used to have TS/SAP/SAR/Codeword. An ex-g/f once said to someone, ‘We’ve been together x years, and I still don’t know what he does!’
Serves me right for posting before reading.
FWIW, our security officer told us after the programme that we could put our clearances on our résumés and answer questions as to whether we have held clearances. At this late date, I’d have to go through the entire background investigation again since I’m well outside the ‘window’ during which a clearance can simply be reactivated.
Funny story: A couple of ‘Suits’ frightened my apartment manager when they were investigating me. She thought I’d committed some sort of federal crime. They assured her that they were only investigating me for a clearance.
As to Misnomer’s post: If I currently held a clearance, I would not volunteer the information.
Misnomer, I think that there’s some room for common sense applications. If for example, one’s job is even janitor (I’m not certain about this, but I believe it to be the case.) at one of the higher end Atomic Power research laboratories, the fact of a lower order clearance can be assumed, and confirming it isn’t really all that stupid. Similarly, aboard ship, I could tell who had clearances just by their rates: Radiomen were cleared through TS, us Nucs through C, etc. If one’s job makes a clearance a necessity, and the fact of the job isn’t considered sensitive information, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to publically state one’s clearance.
I don’t say that your statement isn’t good common sense, just that it’s not absolute.
How do you put up with this? Does it affect your relationships?
I’ve never had any contact with anything or anybody who has security clearance, but I know some people who can’t talk about what they did at work today. Lawyers and doctors keep quiet for ethical reasons.An advertising person keeps quiet for business reasons. Etc.
But here’s the big difference–all these people can tell me what they do, they just cant talk about specific cases. I know the advertising graphics guy is a good artist–and next month, after new campaign gets underway, he’ll proudly point at a billboard and say " I painted that"
I can’t imagine being friends with someone who won’t even tell me what he does.
And it seems scary to be married to someone who keeps secrets from me.
So how do you deal with it?
Military communications. I held a Top Secret (Level III) for several years, recently downshifted to II when my job changed from operator to technician.
[sub]Boy, I’d do anything for hockey tickets…[/sub]
That’s all I meant by my post. 
Hey, I’ve been there! What a surreal experience that was. Right out of a 50’s sci-fi movie. What made it even more unreal is that the cicadas were out in full force, so the high-pitched screeching made it seem very eerie and apocalyptic. And those tunnels are creepy, man.
I’ve held up to TS in the past, which basically allowed me access to certain areas to perform the work I needed to do. I presently hold a secret clearance, for the reason stated. Most information is compartmentalized and agency specific, so if you don’t have the NTK, you ain’t gonna see it.
At least the paperwork is now available online, so you don’t have to endure writer’s cramp and go through a bottle of white-out every time you do one.
What relationships? 
It’s not as if I didn’t tell her what I did in a general sense. I just couldn’t (and still can’t) talk about the projects. I wasn’t a ‘spook’ or anything. It was a job, and I left it at the office. After work and on weekends my g/f and I would go skiing, ride motorcycles, go to dinner, watch movies, go shooting, listen to music, go to parties, hang out… The same stuff as everyone else does. All she knew was that I worked for a certain company. Beyond that, she didn’t care about specifics.
I had a security clearance…
…to the backroom when I was a cashier.
Yeah, that’s all I got.
The more I think about this, the more I feel compelled to disagree. Someone looking to recruit informants can assume that Joe Schmoe has a clearance, but why go ahead and confirm it for them? And who better to try to recruit than a janitor, with unquestioned facility access and a relatively low-paying job? I think “stupid” is too strong a word, but when people needlessly admit to holding a clearance – of any kind, in any job, at any location, even on an “anonymous” message board – it just strikes me as a little thoughtless.
Based on your “If I currently held a clearance, I would not volunteer the information” quote I think you know that resumes aren’t what I’m talking about when I say that I don’t think people should volunteer information about their clearances; there’s a big difference between that and a thread like this.
Heck, I’ve been interviewed for other people’s background investigations, and it doesn’t take an Einstein to deduce that the person probably got a clearance as a result, right? That doesn’t mean I think that the investigator was thoughtless or violated the need-to-know principle. There’s a certain amount of disclosure that’s unavoidable; I just think people should be careful with the avoidable disclosure.
Agreed. Dunno how long ago you were there-cell phones all go to ‘No Service’ within a quarter mile of the gate. Only secure wireless or hardwire communications on site. Use of mirrors to look underneath vehicles in the double gated area-and this was prior to 9/11.
I had one. I held a Q clearance from the DOE when I worked behind the fence at Los Alamos National Laboratory back in the early 1990s. I never worked with any secrets, but they don’t even want you in the same building as wires that carry restricted information if you’re not cleared.
I had a clearance back when I was in the Air Force… Crypto Maintenance. Had to be cleared pretty high, since if it came through the Comm Center, we could possibly see it. When I finished with the Air Force, I said “no more government jobs. I don’t even want to know KFC’s secret recipe.” Clearances are a pain in the ass.
Speaking of Clearances, seems everyone is using different terminology. I never heard of Q except in books, thought it was a joke. And what is area R? I had a TS/SCI. Some of the Compartments within SCI were harder to get than others, but it was still all SCI.
I work at the National Security Agency (twenty years this May). I’ve held TS/SI the whole time, and various compartments off and on.
I’ve never had any problem not talking about work. I have lots of unrelated outside interests, which I think makes this easier.
It’s never been an issue in relationships, and I don’t know that I’d want to date anyone who wanted me to breach the trust required for my job. Wouldn’t that sort of be like asking a doctor boyfriend to prescribe recreational drugs?
All jobs carry restictions. E.g., I once dated a psychiatric nurse. One day, I stopped by the hospital to give her a jar of fruit juice I’d made on my juicer, and a cassette tape that I’d dubbed. She informed me that she wouldn’t be able to bring the glass jar in – too dangerous around psych patients. I noted that the bottle would have been OK at my office, but the tape would have been prohibited.
I had a friend whose husband was an engineer who worked at Wright Patterson AFB in a building so secure that all she knew was he went to work each day and came home. And that presumably whatever he did had something to do with engineering. It didn’t seem to bother either of them at all that they couldn’t talk about his work; in fact, I suspect she appreciated the fact that he couldn’t complain to her about it.
Those background investigations are a pain in the rear, however. My first husband’s clearance got held up for months because they kept coming back and asking about his “foreign-born wife.” Yeah, I was born in India, but to American parents, registered at birth with the State Department, the whole nine yards; the only thing “foreign” about my birth was its location.
And Papa T. used to work in a Pentagon command post where he had to have presidential access clearance because they had something to do with Air Force One radio frequences, so he had fun with clearances, too. In his case his background investigation for the Air Force was easy, but the BI for the (then) Atomic Energy Commission took a couple of extra years because he couldn’t list every single time he’d been across the Canadian border. He grew up in Minnesota, 80 miles from Canada, near Lake of the Woods; who knows how many times they crossed into Canada unknowingly? The military investigators at least grasped the concept; the AEC people apparently were a lot thicker.
Well, my permanent clearance level (Secret) is stated right on my badge, so it’s no secret (heh) to anyone. Honestly, though, very little of the information I’ve seen that is classified isn’t anything you couldn’t find on the Internet; it just comes with better verified sources. Getting my clearance was a piece of cake, which was surprising considering the spotty references I gave. One of our blokes took over a year for his clearance to come through; he’s a citizen but his mother is a FN; when he finally got cleared he went to one of the optional monthy security briefs that the company was holding after the WTC attacks. He was manifestly disappointed; not only was it all info you could get off of Reuters newsfeed, some of it was also out of date owing to the fact that the presentation was two weeks old at that point.
Having a clearance has mostly meant that I could go a few places that most people can’t go; however, while I can’t talk about what I’ve seen, most of it isn’t worth talking about. And the computers in The Vault (our secured working facility) are about ten years out of date, since nobody wants to spend money on machines that can’t be used for general purposes.
We get a lot of milage out of Get Smart quotes at work though. “Active the Cone of Silence!” Your tax dollars hard at work, there.
Stranger
The day I got the call offering me the job, I knew I would be dealing with a no-exceptions, illogical world whenever I dealt with clearance info.
After I accepted the offer, the HR person handed me over to a security person for preliminary BI info – place of birth, date of birth, parents identities, etc.
She asked if I’d done any foreign travel. I replied, “Well, only if you want to count a trip my family took to Niagara Falls when I was ten years old. We walked across the bridge to the Canadian side for an afternoon”.
Expecting a chuckling reply of, “No, that’s OK”, I instead heard a brief pause. Followed by, “So, that would have been about 1969, right?”, in the tone of someone taking detailed notes. :eek:
Many. many years ago I worked for North American Aviation in L.A. and had to get a security clearance from the Atomic Energy Commission (don’t ask). Waited quite a while then got a frantaic call from my mother in NYC that an FBI guy had been asking her all kinds of question about me. She was certain I’d been arrested and my explanation did not convince her.
Some years later at a class reunion a couple of old friends said they’d been called by the FBI too, which only confirmed their firm opinion that I was destined for the lockup. Some would be embarrased, but I thought it all was pretty funny, except the part where my mom’s hair went gray. 