Some time back I wrote in depth about the implementation of something called Homeland Security Presidential Directive #12 (HSPD#12)which threatened my wife's rights as well as the rights of every Federal employee and contractor (my initial coverage was picked up by the Huffington Post). The directive per se isn't bad, merely requiring a uniform system of issuing IDs to all Federal employees and contractors across all agencies. But, under the Bush Administration, no good idea went unexploited for opportunities to deny people their basic civil liberties. The implementation of HSPD#12 became a wholesale attempt to get anyone with access to a Federal facility (including my wife who was a grad student in a NASA run building) to agree to allow the government to investigate every aspect of their lives from medical records, financial records and interviewing their neighbors. Keep in mind, this has nothing to do with top secret materials. EVERYONE from the Board of Ed to NASA etc. would have to comply. This invasion of privacy is back.

Don't get me wrong. I remain impressed that we are far better off in all ways under Obama than we were under Bush, and I have considerable confidence that even when Bush-era polcies are continued under Obama, they will be applied more intelligently. However, there are definitely many Bush-era attacks on our civil liberties that the Obama Administration wants to continue. And no matter how intelligently they apply it, it remains an attack on civil liberties. One such attack impacts my wife directly.
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In Part I of this series, I described the way that government employees are being asked, in the name of Homeland Security Presidential Directive #12, to sign away their rights in order to keep their jobs (in essence). I should note that not all the blame for the problems are due to Homeland Security. Some are due to the way individual agencies are implementing the procedure. I should also note that the precise wording of the directive is not necessarily objectionable. Nevertheless, the requirement to sign a blanket waiver allowing an intrusive government investigation applies across the board and is the way in which the directive is being implemented.

In Part II I describe an aspect of the procedure by which government employees are investigated as part of the imlpementation of Homeland Security Presidential Directive #12. This part of the procedure is called the "Suitability Matrix" and is not in iteself a part of the directive. From what I could tell, it was an existing procedure, used to determine if someone should be debarred from government work, that has been appropraited by the US Office of Personnel Management in order to implement the directive. The Suitability Matrix is objectionable because a.) it does not give the procedure by which it is used, b.) it seems to require an intrusive investigation into an employees personal life way beyond anything Homeland Security Presidential Directive #12 requires, and c.) it includes as "offenses" things that could easily be misused, such as a reference to "sodomy" that, in context, sounds suspiciously like it could be used to debar gays from government work.
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