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Question about Top Secret Security Clearance

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photoengineer

photoengineer

Civil/Environmental
Oct 25, 2009
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I was recently asked to get top secret security clearance at work. I have some questions for those who have experience in this:

1) If I later part ways with the company, do I keep the clearance? (I see jobs that say active DoD clearance required, so I assume this is the case.)

2) Are there financial benefits to having DoD Top Secret Clearance should I be in the job market at some point in the future?

3) Anything else you know about this?

I'm not planning on leaving my company, but we are going through layoffs so I'm happy to apply for clearance. I really didn't see it coming, so there is a lot to learn.

Cedar Bluff Engineering
 
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1) I believe it stays active for a period of time after you leave your employer but I'm not sure on the details.

2) Yes, there are sometimes jobs where having a clearance is more important than relevant job skills. So it increases your employment prospects which one assumes increases your earning potential.

3) I wish I had one;-).

Posting guidelines faq731-376 (probably not aimed specifically at you)
What is Engineering anyway: faq1088-1484​
 
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1> It's active, but useless until you get it transferred to an organization that's certified for your clearance. It will lapse if not renewed within a certain timeframe.

2> Possibly, generally, it's more of a clincher than a monetary benefit. Generally, a SECRET clearance is what's most useful to a company, and few companies are certified for TOP SECRET.

3> There may be some limitations on travel to countries that are not friendly to the US. That may have changed.

TTFN

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One thing to think about is how much of your personal life you want to share with others - for a top secret background check they will look at much of it. My wife was interviewed when her ex-husband was getting his clearance and they had been divorced for years. She said that they asked about finances, character, and other personal stuff.
 
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When I parted ways with the company where I held a security clearance I found that

1) Security clearance goes inactive once you leave. For my clearance it was inactave for a period of 1 year (I believe). If after that you need a clearance again, you have to start over from the begining.

2) A DoD clearance is very expensive to obtain (I think the number was about $20,000 a pop), however it is much cheaper to maintain once its active. This explains why many companies require thier candidate to already have a clearance. This keeps costs down for them, they are basicaly stealing the application costs and downtime for the employee from someone else.

3) A top secret clearance will be very invasive into your personal life. I worked with many people who had them or were getting them and they all agreed that it was taken very seriously by the government. There is also always a chance you will be denied, from what I understand they may never tell you why. That being said, if your a good citizen you really have nothing to fear.

4) Keep a copy of any (unclassified) application paperwork you fil out and send off. You will have to renew your clearance every so often (every 3-5 years for TS if memory serves, longer for secret) and a copy of that next to imposible to dig up information will be invaluable when you renew (it also ensure the information is the same if you can't remember exact dates).

5) You can easily downgrade to a lower clearance if you jump jobs.

6) Always keep your mouth shut. Some people are bad about informing you what is classified and what isn't when your are working with them. If you spill the beans you get punished. Be safe and never discuss any of it unless you have express (preferably written) permisiion to do so.

Just my two cents worth.

A question properly stated is a problem half solved.

Always remember, free advice is worth exactly what you pay for it!
 
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My favorite was one of the only sensitive projects I ever worked on. I was very carefull not to discuss it etc.

Then I open up a magazine one day and there it is with about as much detail about the sensitive aspects as I knew anyway.

Posting guidelines faq731-376 (probably not aimed specifically at you)
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The customer is almost always looser about security than even their own security officiers will permit. Since the beginning of the Bush administration, operational security has only gotten tighter, and worse. There are(were) programs where even the unclassified information had to be protected at nearly the level of the classified information, on the grounds that compilation of sufficient unclassified information would potentially reveal classified information.

That said, we had a program with unclassified performance requirements where every parameter needed to determine compliance to the requirement was classified. So while the answer was supposedly unclassified, the intermediate steps were classified.

What's even more annoying are where the identical requirement is classified on one program, but unclassified on a related program.

Be prepared to memorize a whole new set of passwords and passcodes and to carry around one or more cypher fobs.

TTFN

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Part of the deal about keeping your mouth shut is self preservative. If you spout what you know, then someone can find out that you have access. Everyone who has TS has been through the "its on the news" event. But, you may know just a bit more than is no the news.

Just my $.02.
 
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Well in a previous life I did the initial security clearance paper work for clearances while in the Army for soldiers and I can add a few things.

Top Secret clearances are good for 5 years, secret for 10. If you have ever held a clearance before it is much cheaper to get it again and the cost to upgrade a clearance is much less than an initial investigation. There are some things that will ensure you will not get a clearance.

If you ever did LSD or mushrooms you can forget it.
If you are in severe debt you can forget getting a TS.

I am sure there are more but that is all I can remember. I got out of the Army almost 10 years ago so some things may have changed.

One thing I do know, as long as you tell the whole truth you will most likely get a clearance. We had an old Sergent Major who was a devil on wheels into his 20's, committed all kinds of crimes that he was accused of but never convicted of. When he sat for his TS interview he fessed up to everything. Told the investigators how he pulled everything off and was given his TS. But all of his crimes did not have financial benefits. We had another soldier who committed insurance fraud and fessed up, he was denied. The crime he committed was strictly for financial gain so they considered him a high risk.

After this I am sure big brother is watching me very closely.


SW 2007 SP 5.0
 
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Once upon a time when looking for work, I was talking to the recruiters at an aerospace company (completely unrelated to anything I'd ever done). As best I could tell, though, with the right clearance, they would have hired me, regardless of experience or lack thereof. Kind of a scary thought.
 
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NSA issues these clearances. You need to check with them. Hopefully you are not on the watch list.

My secret clearance was revoked when I left the military.

Mike McCann
MMC Engineering
Motto: KISS
Motivation: Don't ask
 
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Once upon a time, it could take up to 6 months to get a clearance; I distinctly recall a bunch of new hires simply sitting around in cubes twiddling, while waiting for their clearances. If you have contract whose first milestone of PDR is in 3 months, then yes, you'd hire pretty much anyone, just to stay on schedule and budget.

However, I think that during the Bush adminstration everything got classified, and they had to streamline the process just to haev enough clearances to handle all the added classified material.

TTFN

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