Somebody knows EVERYTHING about me

I’m sipping my evening tea and reading the forum – sort of became a little tradition lately – and I suddenly realized that somebody out there knows everything about me.
Every single applicant that fills out SF86 to every ‘t’ crossed and every ‘i’ dotted is putting his entire life in the open. Think about it for a minute… somebody out there who is also about celebrate 4th of July, not related to me, who I have never seen in my life, knows about me no less, but sometimes even more than my family and friends. The detailed description of someone’s life that needs to be filled in SF86 is astonishing.

I wonder how many investigators/adjudicators are going through the SF86 application on average?
Also, what happens with applications whose applicants won’t make it through the BI/Adj process?

It gives me the chills

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Partially true. Partially false. You know more about yourself than anyone, even the government.

Although some people are convinced the moment they begin filling out government paperwork they are “trapped” or “tricked” into a predicament of sorts. This is where falsification, memory errors, and lack of awareness come into play.

Some years back I was supporting counternarcotics operations as an analyst. We used a proprietary database similar to the ones used by credit monitoring companies to try to dig up leads based on financial transactions. The types and amounts of info in that database were astonishing… and this was some twenty years ago.

I could just about fill out an SF-86 on anyone in the country using that database. And anybody willing to pay the subscription fee could get access.

Google and Facebook probably know more about you than the government :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

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Yep. And Amazon and Netflix. The USG is in the dark on what they really know about the average US citizen.

Truth. We are monetized. “We” are what is sold daily on the web. Free app? No, that is the token you get for selling oneself. How we ever let that happen is beyond me. How many times a month do you get the “how we handle your private info” and “can you opt out?” Form. It says “no.” You want to bank with BOA? The courts ruled your info belongs to them. Disgusting really. Own a smart phone? GPS? Who doesn’t. Tracking. Some days I want to ditch the phone and GPs but I’m lazy and stupid with sense of direction. So like 95% of population I GOOGLE. I WAZE, and I use smart phone.

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Little did he know…

Good news for us Investigators is that we touch so many cases, hard to remember most all of them. Mostly remember if the Subject was a jackass or not, not their background.

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I recall the amusing (to me) and the dangerous Subjects. I don’t recall the names even.

I was interviewing a Subject for a TS-PR when I mused out loud that their “story” was familiar. The Subject smiled and she stated, “It should [BackgdInvestigator], I told you the same thing five years ago”.

This has happened more than once. Sorry - less than one per 1000 cases are interesting or unusual enough to recall two weeks after I transmit the report.

Technology is a b****, ain’t it?

I get junk e-mails all the time relating to Google searches I’ve made or articles I’ve viewed on social media.

Maybe I should become a hipster and start using Duck Duck Go.

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I once interviewed a subject for her re-investigation and there were a few issues. About two months later I interviewed her as an employment source and I had completely forgot that I had done her subject interview. There are a few people in my neighborhood that I have interviewed for their re-investigations. I run into them once in a while and I usually can’t remember their name, let alone any details of their lives. So while someone may have most of your life story on your SF-86, we don’t care, you life isn’t that interesting . . . .

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Your final sentence raises an excellent point. Making a request under the PA may provide you with at least some clues

So many hours must be spent on completing the documents required. It can be very frustrating indeed when all that comes out of the time and effort is a one-page letter of rejection.

I submitted a FOIA in 2017 because I wanted to know what China knows. Still waiting

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