Haft of the Spear

For sure it will help. However, no one seems to be looking at the all the steps in the clearance & reinvestigation process that have little rationale. I’ve been kicking around in my mind the concept of “security tenure.” A whole lot of people I’ve worked with are, by consensus, not security risks. Guys who did time in the military and migrated into the classified realms of government, either as feds or contractors. Decades in the business, yet every five years we waste time and effort reinvestigating them. One guy I worked with took a brief fling in the private sector after a decade or two in the Army and as a TS-cleared contractor, and I wanted to bring him back into the fold, two years later. Took a full year to get his tickets reinstated, and it was all a waste of time and effort. Should have taken one interview, with an experienced security officer (one who doesn’t see Kim Philby behind every smiling face). Fact is, most of the people who stay in this business are trustworthy, and a couple of years sabbatical in a dot com won’t turn them rogue. We need to recognize this fact and play the odds, which are probably around a million to one that someone coming up for a TS clearance is a traitor.

For starters, I would really like to see standardized BI reqs so that all the money we’re supposedly saving having USIS, etc. pay retired cops to do the work actually results in an econ benefit.

That should/would/could lead to “clearance portability” (secret cousin to health-care portability), which would - as you say - allow folks to jump around w/o having to hold up their careers (or a mission) because of petty bureaucracy.

As it stands now I see no rhyme or reason to it all; I know federal LE who wait ages for tickets; I know guys who have been out of the biz for over a decade get back in inside of six months. WTF?!

We need to take a lesson from cops and prosecutors; they do none of the security stuff we do but they still manage to bring down crime syndicates, gangs, etc. Wow, how in the world could that be?