11–20 of 55 posts
Getting a security clearance comes with liability and potential downside that doesn't exist in the private sector. Some examples: * Restrictions and reporting requirements around international travel and contact with foreign nationals * Restrictions on discussing work with friends and family * Prohibition on cannabis use * Prohibition on reading publicly leaked secret documents (from the Snowden days: https://web.arc…
> Palantir’s accelerated security clearance plan for students
This addresses several issues with the headline as presented:
- It’s capitalized appropriately for HN.
- It clearly states that this is about students only, reducing the scope of the effort from the unstated framing: “all workers”.
- It reflects the single-company focus of Palantir in the article, improving HN submission search results for that company.
- It reuses the exact wording of the most key heading in the article with only two words added: “for students”.
Not sure why this article (or Palantir) is trying to paint this as a new thing. I started at a legacy defense contractor immediately after graduating from undergrad. I was hired and had my security clearance process initiated during the fall of my senior year. Unfortunately this was during the great backup of ~2016 so I still wasn't cleared by the time I started, but they still had unclassified work I could do.
oh so that is why there's always that crap on the news?
Man I miss when they lured smart kids with the false promises of moon rockets
A job that requires a security clearance is not a job that I want to be doing, ever.
Why’s that? I’m really not familiar with the ins and outs of clearance. Do you have ethical reasons? Or practical?
A job that requires a security clearance is not a job that I want to be doing, ever.
Why’s that? I’m really not familiar with the ins and outs of clearance. Do you have ethical reasons? Or practical?
> Over the last five years more of my students have understood that Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine and strategic competition with the People’s Republic of China mean that the world is no longer a stable and safe place. This has convinced many of them to work on national security problems in defense startups. oh so that is why there's always that crap on the news? Man I miss when they lured smart kids with the false p…
Contractor A does everything in a closed area. All software is written, built, and tested on classified information systems. In this situation, it is impractical to move anything out, regardless if the software is actually classified. It's easy to move things back and forth between the developer's machines and the (necessarily) classified test/production system, but now you have the problem from TFA: you can only hire cleared employees or you eat the cost of them doing nothing useful for ~1 year.
Contractor B has arranged things so that the work that has to be done in a closed area is only on the specific information that _must_ be classified as described in the security classification guide for that program. Depending on the program this could be a small software library or even a configuration file. Interns and first-year employees can work on the majority of the system with dummy/stub libraries and fake data, then hand their work over to cleared employees for further testing in the closed area (if that is even necessary for the work at hand). It is not very hard to move software from an unclassified to a classified area. It is harder to move test results from a classified to an unclassified area. A description of what happened when an unclassified piece of software runs in a classified environment _can_ be sanitized and still leave all information necessary to continue work outside. Aside from the situation described in TFA, this also reduces the "it is miserable working in the SCIF" retention problem.
It requires work to arrange things in this way, but not much more work if the software is written using best practices. Maybe this strategy only applies to software development. There are other professions out there I've heard. :)