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by Animats 124 days ago
I went through national-security polygraph exams twice, and they were no big deal. Filling out SF-86 (which used to start "List all residences from birth"), now that's a hassle.

In my aerospace company days, almost everything I did was unclassified, but I was put through the mill of getting higher level security clearances so I could be assigned to classified projects. Fortunately, I never was.

2 comments

I'm curious about how "residence" is defined for this purpose (and for many purposes). Often it's just presumed that people will know what a "residence" is, but I've lived many years of my life houseless, including on a skoolie.

I never know what to say about my residence. Even now, I own a house, but I don't consider it my home, at least not all the time. Have a specific "residence" presumes that there's one set of coordinates on earth that is canonical for each human, but many people don't live this way.

Is there a definition that cuts through this?

90 days living there is the threshold.

You wouldn’t make a good candidate for a national security job, not that it sounds like you want to be. Investigators would want to know who you’d been associating with at all those different places, and tracking it all down would take a long time ( the wait for the investigation can be years, the period during which you’d be unhireable for the job you were going after.)

The paradigm of a residence is much more fluid than many people think.

I used to work on boats. For income tax purposes I was a BVI resident, for immigration purposes I was a US resident since I didn't have a residence permit in the BVI (not necessary for boat crew), for the purpose of immigration establishing a relationship with my future wife we did not - by their judgment - live together, or even in the same country (despite sharing a cabin with ~10 sq. ft. of floor space), for the purposes of voter registration I was a Colorado resident.

Depending on which government and agency within that government you ask, I could be a US resident (Colorado sec. of state), while not being a US resident (IRS), while being a US resident (US CBP), while not being a resident of the country I was physically living and working in (BVI), while living in a different country than my wife who I was never more than 100 ft. from (CBSA).

The actual foreign address accepted by the IRS, and Canadian immigration authorities (slightly anonymized): [BOAT_NAME],Bob's dock, East End, Tortola, BVI.

Residence is far more complicated for many people than the standard government mold assumes.

...I think I'd make a great candidate for a national security job, if the job meant the security of the nation rather than the security of the state.

But I take your point of course. :-)

> I was put through the mill of getting higher level security clearances so I could be assigned to classified projects. Fortunately, I never was.

Sure was lucky you didn’t work on any of those classified projects - <wink>

The company had decided to move networking R&D to Colorado Springs, where they supported USAF facilities, and I didn't want to leave Silicon Valley for that.
Sure <wink>