[colonelxc]

A lot of people at the national labs have Q clearances, even if they never do nuclear stuff. As the article somewhat mentions, it's roughly 'Q=TS+nukes'. So if you need to do any TS stuff at a national lab, you're going to get a Q clearance.

[downut]

I never did any TS stuff with my Q clearance. Nor was I on track to do so. I got the impression that it was just another level of interview screening, because they could. Frankly though the emergent social environment gave me the creeps, so I quit.

Bay Area lab, lot of weirdos (who I liked a lot) living in that creepy scene. Forces of control over a cute zoo of nerds.

[seastonATccs]

Worked at LLNL Loong time ago. I loved the weirdos there. Any random day you could sit next to someone during lunch and get a masters level course on flywheels or vacuum pumps.

[samstave]

I recall the two biggest stories about foreign spies in these labs:

1. Chinese blamed for stealing Los Alamos secret by stashing hard drives behind a copy machine and grabbing them later.

2. Chinese engineer at JPL worked there for decades and was thought to be a nice family in Pasadina - but lived in a really super spartan house and the wife was the engineer's handler and their kids were the mules to haul data back to ccp

3. China's trickle hack on Lockheed by phishing employees who had attended defense conferences

4. China hacking Lockheed providers in Taiwan with an air gap and sneaker-net to gain access to Lockheed laptops via USB exploits (this was one of the factors, IIRC why epoxy in USB ports was common) -- ((But if you ever had any SGI O2 machines -- there was an additional port (serial I think - I don't think they were USB) but this 'option' was several thousand more $ -- but it was on every machine and all you had to do was punch out the plastic cover from the case)

5. Israel + USA hacking Iran via STUXNET in the same method with air-gaps etc.

6. The guy who worked at oak ridge, took on a Russian Mail Order Bride and got her a job in oak ridge (accounting I think, I can't recall) -- and it turned out she was a Russian handler, but they denied it -- but everyone knew that every single person from the USG who went to Russia was assigned a female handler, and these handlers were highly trained, and they had several levels of handlers above them to ensure non-defection chain-of-custody-of-intel.

---

I had a few more specific to nukes - but I got distracted - Ill update if I recall the others.

Some of the above have REALLY good documentaries on them. Some of them are known by fewer people - but they are not secret breaches... they got memory-holed.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/17/us/missing-nuclear-data-f...

2.? -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wen_Ho_Lee (I am not sure if I am conflating these with another case.)

5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOwMW6agpTI

6. I cant find 6..

[downut]

If you're not using Wen Ho Lee as a counterexample this is misinformation.

I was watching this at the time and... yeah, ex Q cleared at the time, and NYT revealed some of its underlying profit driven sleazy motivations with that hack job.

The others could be legit, I have no idea. But be careful before the evidence gets brought to trial and a guilty verdict is obtained.

Snowden showed and I can confirm, from decades earlier, there's a lot of workarounds going on daily just to get shit done. Some were absurd.

[chrisseaton]

> So if you need to do any TS stuff at a national lab, you're going to get a Q clearance.

Well you're going to apply for it but you're not necessarily going to get it.

[ganoushoreilly]

It's very rare that if you meet TS requirements you're not getting the Q (if you're placed in a position where it's needed as more than likely you are already SCI cleared). In fact if you are denied for Q it likely means you're losing your TS too. There are exceptions but I would argue they're not the norm.

Either way, we have propensity to over classify things in the government and that's a whole other argument.

[a_lost_needle]

Pedantic irrelevance?

[RyJones]

That was my first thought - PNNL spits out a ton of people with Q clearance