Re: Kafka would have been proud ...

[Mark Seiden <mis () seiden com>]

On Sep 11, 2014, at 2:41 PM, Bill Terwilliger <sideshowtwig () gmail com> wrote:

> Based on this paragraph, it seems that she is not worthy of passing her background check:
>
> “””
> Barr maintains that she had been truthful throughout both interviews, and that “there was no material fact about 
> these organizations for me to omit.” Barr says she was casually acquainted with two of the convicted murderers, 
> Judith Clark and Kuwasi Balagoon (née Donald Weems) but had no prior knowledge of their criminal activities. Clark 
> remains in a maximum security prison for women in New York state, and Balagoon died in 1986 of an AIDS-related 
> illness. (Barr says she wrote to Balagoon occasionally while he was in prison—“it would have been reprehensible for 
> me to drop my correspondence with a dying person,” she explains—and visited him once.)
> “””

this speaks well of her, in my book, as a human.

there’s a story terry winograd tells about when he was a grad student at MIT AI Lab, interested in natural language.
marvin minsky wanted his students to work on natural language to demonstrate that the AI approaches were as good as
parsing as those of the MIT Linguists.

When he ran into grad students of Noam Chomsky’s at parties, and said he was working at the AI Lab they would turn the
other way and refuse to talk with him.

when i worked for IBM Research in the late ‘70s, i remember richard stallman being bitingly critical of me and my 
colleagues
as sellouts, working for a company that he thought was just a monopolist that made mediocre products.  we didn’t think 
of
ourselves that way, and thought we did quality work and had nothing to do with price fixing or murder.  but rms 
generalized from his labels for the group and applied them to all individuals.

so group membership is by itself not a very good description of individual behavior.  and being a member of a group 
which
was “affiliated” somehow with some other group is one degree of separation.

this kind of blacklisting is what the mccarthys of the world did to hollywood actors during the cold war.  they were
blacklisted and couldn’t work.


> That seems to indicate that she knowingly had ongoing ties with a known terrorist.   She clearly had a relationship 
> if she was writing to them in prison and occasionally visiting them.  And she must have had some inclination that 
> they were classified as terrorist if she saw something on the news about their terrorist activities.  Her statement 
> about having “no material fact…” is odd to me.  Is she saying that she she didn’t have concrete evidence therefore 
> she wasn’t knowingly associated with terrorist?  Am I missing something else?

not all crime is terrorism.  this semantic transformation happened a bit after 9/11, not in the 1980s.


> Based on my experience, all the OPM cares about is honesty.  If she had admitted to the relationship during the first 
> interview, the process likely would have been longer and they would have dug deeper, but she almost certainly would 
> have passed in the end.  But when you get caught lying, no matter how small the lie, the process abruptly ends and 
> you [rightly] fail.

i have been collecting opposite experience suggesting FIS and OPM are arbitrary and capricious.  an ex federal
law enforcement (25 year) friend of mine won’t work for them.  apparently they try to use retirees to do background 
investigations, but pay such a low fee that the quality is correspondingly low.


i can think of 

a case where a high school student was fired from a govt job because of their parents’ politics, after showing
up and working for a few weeks.

a case where someone long trusted to do work (as a cryptographer) was denied the right to continue working 
until they passed their polygraph, which for some reason nobody can understand they failed multiple times,
finally passing it.

a case where a summer student was inexplicably fired from a summer job in a foreign consulate and never told
what his offense was, and threatened with cancellation of his govt funded scholarship if he appealed.  his visa
was cancelled and he was told to leave the country in two days.

an opposite case where someone who stole money from his ex spouse by forging checks was given a high level
government job as a grant administrator despite the interview of his ex and several other people who think,
um, not highly of him.

and these are just the few cases i can think of off the top of my head.

i have worked on a lot of federal criminal cases, both on defenses and prosecutions, and i can tell you that the
government side of some story is seldom completely accurate but always self-serving, and i often see
poor quality policing and investigation.  


> —bill
>
>
> On Sep 11, 2014, at 3:09 PM, Rob, grandpa of Ryan, Trevor, Devon & Hannah <rmslade () shaw ca> wrote:
>
> > http://news.sciencemag.org/people-events/2014/09/researcher-loses-job-nsf-after-
> > government-questions-her-role-1980s-activist
> >
> > ======================  (quote inserted randomly by Pegasus Mailer)
> > rslade () vcn bc ca     slade () victoria tc ca     rslade () computercrime org
> > He who asks is a fool for five minutes.  He who does not ask
> > remains a fool forever.
> > victoria.tc.ca/techrev/rms.htm http://www.infosecbc.org/links
> > http://blogs.securiteam.com/index.php/archives/author/p1/
> > http://twitter.com/rslade
> > _______________________________________________
> > Fun and Misc security discussion for OT posts.
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>
>
> _______________________________________________
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