At that point it depends on the clearance level you're aspiring to (which directly determines the depth, rigor, and effort of the investigation), what information you volunteer, and what others volunteer. The Department of Defense security clearance application process starts with a massive, detailed questionnaire form, and can get more grueling from there.Adrian Laguna wrote:If all Broomstick's sister did was wear bracelets and attend marches, how would the government know about it? They don't keep records of everyone who goes to marches or gets symbolic bracelets. If the government doesn't know about it, then it would not affect her ability to get a security clearance. For all we know there are people with the highest clearance who were at some point involved in "subersive" activities, but nobody knows about it because they and their cohorts have kept their mouths shut.
As an example, some of the steps in obtaining Dept. of Defense clearances at the Top Secret level, whether with or without project-specific SCI or SAP or any other "modifiers", tend to involve not only a polygraph examination, but also a full Single Scope Background Investigation. While filling out the application, you provide many references, they show up at their residences and ask questions, and maybe even ask for further references. So what an applicant must consider is, how much should they volunteer out, and how much will their references (and references of the references if need be) tell the investigators. That's a scenario straight out of game theory.
It's absolutely true that if you, as an applicant for a security clearance, have sufficiently strong ties with anyone else that could be potentially interviewed regarding your past that everyone keeps a straight, synchronized story and doesn't reveal anything, AND there is no contrary evidence to put any statements into question (whether a police report or even an college disciplinary report, whatever the investigators can get their hands on), then you'll probably be cleared if there aren't any other unrelated issues (specks on a financial record, foreign influence, criminal record, etc.). Not being able to explain or mitigate why their evidence contradicts your word is also a denial as it's seen as not being able to prove your own trustworthiness.
Obviously, if there are gaps or conflicts between stories, then things get interesting. But quite a few applicants simply take the easy way out and volunteer a lot of information right off the bat. Especially looking over the guidelines, it may be more advantageous to just tell it all, instead of actively hiding or falsifying information, which, if discovered, is an automatic denial, and said falsification will be taken into consideration during any other security clearance investigations for the rest of the applicant's life, usually resulting in a denial of those as well.
If the offense is severe enough, and there are no or insufficient mitigating circumstances (as defined by the adjudicating guidelines), or even if there's any question in regards to national security and/or concerns of trust, then there will be a denial anyway. Many times there's simply no way around it: either you come clean and are denied right off the bat, or you falsify information, and the as the hidden information gets more serious and/or extensive, the higher the chance of you being discovered and denied. The cost of choosing to falsify information is extremely high in that, if discovered, it will be one additional (and very serious) impediment to future security clearance applications.
Perusing through a list of cases regarding civilian-contractor security clearance decisions, there are cases where clearances were denied for seemingly light activities, or even cases that seem that the applicant did literally nothing wrong but everything as best as he could, while there are cases where people who have committed some serious drug and alcohol-related felonies and yet were granted clearances, usually by the applicants being able to fulfill all applicable mitigating circumstances.
