The Security Post (with rant)
I've lost track of how long ago I promised a post about what it's like to live in a world full of security classifications and what TV (particularly RTD) gets wrong and right. Finally, I'm writing it.
Washington DC is the world's biggest company town.
It's possible to not work for the Government or anything involved with the Government - but the vast majority around here work for some branch of the Government or run a private company that does outsourced Government work or lobbies the Government or feeds Government workers or cleans up after the Government, and if they're not doing that at the Federal level, they're doing it for local government. This is a place where hotels host job fairs open only to people with clearances... and even the janitors and garbage collectors need those clearances.
It's a town where you're just expected to know what's being discussed, no matter how it is mentioned. Things are referred to by acronym: NASA, IRS, FBI - or generics: The Company, The Agency. Sometimes they're just referred to by location, like Quantico or The Fort (Washington is peppered with forts, the biggest being Meade to the northeast and Belvoir to the southwest).
It's a town where everyone knows that the CIA's in Langley... except that Langley doesn't exist. (I'm not making this up.)
Ob disclaimer: my authority for writing this is just living in this town. Hate to be disappointing, but I write software manuals for a small company you've never heard of and I'm about to do the same for a smaller company you've never heard of even more. However, I spent 9 years working for American Chemical Society... which just happened to be right next to the Russian Embassy. (It's right across the street from the National Education Association, and yes, sometimes I had to run across the street because they'd delivered a lunch to the wrong Nea.) I've worked at a remove for the IRS. I was on a shortlist for a job at the Department of Homeland Security, but I got a better offer turned it down before the security process was completed. I'm on the friends to call list for a couple of people with clearances. I was working at the National Institute of Health on 9/11. I've got friends whose jobs I will never know.
But you don't have to take it from me. A while back, the Post did an excellent article about training for the Secret Service (link should not require registration) that makes most of the points I'm about to make -- only with fewer TV references.
WHAT TV GETS RIGHT (It's not what you think)
"UNIT: Unauthorized Personnel Keep Out" - Pretty stupidass to put a big sign on the road leading into a cleared facility, isn't it? Except that we've got "[insert name here] Employee Only" exit signs right on the highway. (For the record, if you go up NASA's, you're assumed an idiot until proven a criminal. If you take the wrong spoke off the circle on 32 and end up on NSA's doorstep, you're assumed a criminal until proven an idiot. OTOH, the NSA guards were much politer, although - to steal a Pratchett line - in a manner that made clear that impoliteness was a future option.)
"Bloody Torchwood!" That scene from Torchwood, where the alien was driving around in a sportscar and then the (marked) Torchwood van stopped and asked her to point the way? Secret organizations aren't that secret, even when they're trying to be. When the Soviet President was visiting next to my company, I had to show my ID to the DC cops. We all pretended that they weren't being watched by guys in bad suits and *they* in turn weren't being watched by guys in better suits. When I saw Sneakers and Hunt for Red October in the theaters, you could tell who worked where by their reactions. Before 9/11, it was possible to go to Columbia Mall and count dozens of NSA parking passes.
WHAT TV GETS WRONG
In a nutshell, what Torchwood and UNIT get wrong are by having someone who thinks their own government is evil writing about government organizations. Think about it. In RTD's world, Torchwood 3 - incompetent, understaffed, without any oversight authority or respect for civil rights - are the good guys. I've got plenty of opinions about the choices my Government makes, but I sure as hell wouldn't be sleeping sounder if one of the citizen militias was in charge, enforcing their own idiosyncratic notion of interpretations of the laws.
And as for security procedures... No ID cards, no gate guard always there, all you need to know is where to push the button to roll open the door - museums have more detailed security procedures than it takes to get into the Torchwood Hub. At least they check purses. Even public transport has figured out the idea of turnstiles to keep out people who haven't paid. (I can, off the top of my head, think of about 4 Torchwood plots that would have been foiled by even a basic equipment check or an automatic ID-and-turnstile arrangement.)
But what I really want to rant about is how TV - not just RTD, but other shows - treat clearances. You don't need one of your own, just know someone who has one (much less live among thousands who do) to know how utterly ridiculously they're treated in entertainment.
First, they aren't mandatory - for SOME things. Even in this town I know people who don't want clearances - they don't want the accompanying loss of privacy in the process, or it contravenes their ethics to work in any capacity that might ally with the military. I've heard of people who only want to get cleared a little bit (cleared jobs pay better and are more stable) but don't want to go very high because they don't want the restrictions. It's possible to work here without having one. It's even possible to have some government jobs without one... for example, the Smithsonian is partially a Government institution.
Second, clearances aren't one size fits all. They don't even transfer between most groups - the DHS and the IRS have completely different areas of concern and their clearance process reflects that.
Third, getting a clearance doesn't mean that you walk into the highest levels of power right away (sorry, Lois Habiba.) The Secret Service article points out that even if you make it through the class, you've got a lot of time on other jobs to put in before you earn a chance to work with the actual First Family.
Fourth, clearances don't come quickly or casually. The Secret Service article talks about how it took nine months for some of the people to be asked to come in for training, and how they had to have passed the written test, the drug test, the vision test, the hearing test, the initial interview, the panel interview, the home interview, and the "worst experience of my life," the polygraph.
Cleared access is not something you get handed to you because Captain Jack thinks your curiosity is cute (Gwen Cooper). It is also not something that you gang-press someone into (Liz Shaw) or hand out to keep a relative employed (Jo Grant). (No, it's not just modern Who that screws this up.) It's something you work to get a chance to have, then work more to get granted, and because of that, the people who go through this process don't do it lightly.
So why do it?
One of my cleared friends once told me that her orders were to answer any question about her work with the phrase "It saves American lives." If there's one attitude that I find everywhere, it's not that the people work for the government because they agree with the President or with Government policy or even that they took their work because they felt it was a great noble cause. It's that they believe *in the bone* that the work they do protects people (not necessarily just Americans) and that if it absolutely comes to it, they are honor-bound to keep their secrets NO MATTER WHAT.
That's not just rhetoric. The Secret Service article lays it bare in pretty graphic terms: Make a nice meat shield between the protectee and the problem. When the hammer hits the metal, you don't think about your hopes or your plans or your family or your loved ones. You take the damn bullet... and keep fighting while you're dying.
This is why I don't cut Tosh slack for allowing herself to be manipulated - twice! - into betraying her top-secret employers. RTD thinks it's reason enough that she was in love with Mary or that her mother was in danger. As if she was the first person in the history of ever to have fallen in love with someone who used that for their own ends, or someone who threatened her family. As if no cleared agency in the history of clearances had ever thought anyone could be manipulated like that and thus had no options or plans in place for those very eventualities.
As if no cleared agency in the world-wide history of ever had had corrupt employees and thus had double-checks and backup security to keep the bad apples from getting access to things outside their areas.
RTD doesn't just think that governments are corrupt. He thinks they're profoundly STUPID.
I've ranted about Fragments in particular before, but I'm going to say it again - by the very virtue of her getting cleared to work in UNIT, Tosh should have been aware of any help she could have had when her family was threatened and been aware that they would quickly know when she compromised their security. By the virtue of her having three brain cells to knock together, she should have known that if the terrorist pressure on her worked once, it would work again and thus they'd use it again.
And no matter now nasty RTD's Gitmo-fueled fantasies of UNIT security are, the fact still remains that Tosh literally built and handed over a working weapon of mass destruction and the first act of the terrorists was to turn it on and start destroying things.
I really wanted to like Tosh as a character, and for a while I did, but I utterly lost respect for her when it was made clear that her first and constant reaction to emotional manipulation would be to commit treason.... despite the fact that every time she did it, she put many lives in danger.
It's not just RTD, though. I heard (admittedly second-hand) that Numb3rs had a plot [ETA: which I got wrong and was correctly cited in comments, but still boiled down to putting loyalty to friends over direct orders to Knock Something Off; it's making people unsafe.]
I'm sure that somewhere out there someone nodded because family loyalty was more important than anything.
But in this town, the politest reaction was "..." (I don't know anyone in the FBI, but I'm willing to bet that their reactions were a lot louder and a lot more profane.)
TV producers write what they think will give an emotional bang.
But the worldview is different in the company town founded by men who weren't kidding when they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to their work. Where there are memorial stars in some places because even the names can't be unclassified long enough to be remembered. Where one of the base job qualifications is to be willing to take a bullet - sometimes for someone you cannot personally stand and don't agree with.
There are loyalties more important than family. In some branches of the Government, there are loyalties more important than life. That, in a nutshell, is what TV gets wrong.
Washington DC is the world's biggest company town.
It's possible to not work for the Government or anything involved with the Government - but the vast majority around here work for some branch of the Government or run a private company that does outsourced Government work or lobbies the Government or feeds Government workers or cleans up after the Government, and if they're not doing that at the Federal level, they're doing it for local government. This is a place where hotels host job fairs open only to people with clearances... and even the janitors and garbage collectors need those clearances.
It's a town where you're just expected to know what's being discussed, no matter how it is mentioned. Things are referred to by acronym: NASA, IRS, FBI - or generics: The Company, The Agency. Sometimes they're just referred to by location, like Quantico or The Fort (Washington is peppered with forts, the biggest being Meade to the northeast and Belvoir to the southwest).
It's a town where everyone knows that the CIA's in Langley... except that Langley doesn't exist. (I'm not making this up.)
Ob disclaimer: my authority for writing this is just living in this town. Hate to be disappointing, but I write software manuals for a small company you've never heard of and I'm about to do the same for a smaller company you've never heard of even more. However, I spent 9 years working for American Chemical Society... which just happened to be right next to the Russian Embassy. (It's right across the street from the National Education Association, and yes, sometimes I had to run across the street because they'd delivered a lunch to the wrong Nea.) I've worked at a remove for the IRS. I was on a shortlist for a job at the Department of Homeland Security, but I got a better offer turned it down before the security process was completed. I'm on the friends to call list for a couple of people with clearances. I was working at the National Institute of Health on 9/11. I've got friends whose jobs I will never know.
But you don't have to take it from me. A while back, the Post did an excellent article about training for the Secret Service (link should not require registration) that makes most of the points I'm about to make -- only with fewer TV references.
WHAT TV GETS RIGHT (It's not what you think)
"UNIT: Unauthorized Personnel Keep Out" - Pretty stupidass to put a big sign on the road leading into a cleared facility, isn't it? Except that we've got "[insert name here] Employee Only" exit signs right on the highway. (For the record, if you go up NASA's, you're assumed an idiot until proven a criminal. If you take the wrong spoke off the circle on 32 and end up on NSA's doorstep, you're assumed a criminal until proven an idiot. OTOH, the NSA guards were much politer, although - to steal a Pratchett line - in a manner that made clear that impoliteness was a future option.)
"Bloody Torchwood!" That scene from Torchwood, where the alien was driving around in a sportscar and then the (marked) Torchwood van stopped and asked her to point the way? Secret organizations aren't that secret, even when they're trying to be. When the Soviet President was visiting next to my company, I had to show my ID to the DC cops. We all pretended that they weren't being watched by guys in bad suits and *they* in turn weren't being watched by guys in better suits. When I saw Sneakers and Hunt for Red October in the theaters, you could tell who worked where by their reactions. Before 9/11, it was possible to go to Columbia Mall and count dozens of NSA parking passes.
WHAT TV GETS WRONG
In a nutshell, what Torchwood and UNIT get wrong are by having someone who thinks their own government is evil writing about government organizations. Think about it. In RTD's world, Torchwood 3 - incompetent, understaffed, without any oversight authority or respect for civil rights - are the good guys. I've got plenty of opinions about the choices my Government makes, but I sure as hell wouldn't be sleeping sounder if one of the citizen militias was in charge, enforcing their own idiosyncratic notion of interpretations of the laws.
And as for security procedures... No ID cards, no gate guard always there, all you need to know is where to push the button to roll open the door - museums have more detailed security procedures than it takes to get into the Torchwood Hub. At least they check purses. Even public transport has figured out the idea of turnstiles to keep out people who haven't paid. (I can, off the top of my head, think of about 4 Torchwood plots that would have been foiled by even a basic equipment check or an automatic ID-and-turnstile arrangement.)
But what I really want to rant about is how TV - not just RTD, but other shows - treat clearances. You don't need one of your own, just know someone who has one (much less live among thousands who do) to know how utterly ridiculously they're treated in entertainment.
First, they aren't mandatory - for SOME things. Even in this town I know people who don't want clearances - they don't want the accompanying loss of privacy in the process, or it contravenes their ethics to work in any capacity that might ally with the military. I've heard of people who only want to get cleared a little bit (cleared jobs pay better and are more stable) but don't want to go very high because they don't want the restrictions. It's possible to work here without having one. It's even possible to have some government jobs without one... for example, the Smithsonian is partially a Government institution.
Second, clearances aren't one size fits all. They don't even transfer between most groups - the DHS and the IRS have completely different areas of concern and their clearance process reflects that.
Third, getting a clearance doesn't mean that you walk into the highest levels of power right away (sorry, Lois Habiba.) The Secret Service article points out that even if you make it through the class, you've got a lot of time on other jobs to put in before you earn a chance to work with the actual First Family.
Fourth, clearances don't come quickly or casually. The Secret Service article talks about how it took nine months for some of the people to be asked to come in for training, and how they had to have passed the written test, the drug test, the vision test, the hearing test, the initial interview, the panel interview, the home interview, and the "worst experience of my life," the polygraph.
Cleared access is not something you get handed to you because Captain Jack thinks your curiosity is cute (Gwen Cooper). It is also not something that you gang-press someone into (Liz Shaw) or hand out to keep a relative employed (Jo Grant). (No, it's not just modern Who that screws this up.) It's something you work to get a chance to have, then work more to get granted, and because of that, the people who go through this process don't do it lightly.
So why do it?
One of my cleared friends once told me that her orders were to answer any question about her work with the phrase "It saves American lives." If there's one attitude that I find everywhere, it's not that the people work for the government because they agree with the President or with Government policy or even that they took their work because they felt it was a great noble cause. It's that they believe *in the bone* that the work they do protects people (not necessarily just Americans) and that if it absolutely comes to it, they are honor-bound to keep their secrets NO MATTER WHAT.
That's not just rhetoric. The Secret Service article lays it bare in pretty graphic terms: Make a nice meat shield between the protectee and the problem. When the hammer hits the metal, you don't think about your hopes or your plans or your family or your loved ones. You take the damn bullet... and keep fighting while you're dying.
This is why I don't cut Tosh slack for allowing herself to be manipulated - twice! - into betraying her top-secret employers. RTD thinks it's reason enough that she was in love with Mary or that her mother was in danger. As if she was the first person in the history of ever to have fallen in love with someone who used that for their own ends, or someone who threatened her family. As if no cleared agency in the history of clearances had ever thought anyone could be manipulated like that and thus had no options or plans in place for those very eventualities.
As if no cleared agency in the world-wide history of ever had had corrupt employees and thus had double-checks and backup security to keep the bad apples from getting access to things outside their areas.
RTD doesn't just think that governments are corrupt. He thinks they're profoundly STUPID.
I've ranted about Fragments in particular before, but I'm going to say it again - by the very virtue of her getting cleared to work in UNIT, Tosh should have been aware of any help she could have had when her family was threatened and been aware that they would quickly know when she compromised their security. By the virtue of her having three brain cells to knock together, she should have known that if the terrorist pressure on her worked once, it would work again and thus they'd use it again.
And no matter now nasty RTD's Gitmo-fueled fantasies of UNIT security are, the fact still remains that Tosh literally built and handed over a working weapon of mass destruction and the first act of the terrorists was to turn it on and start destroying things.
I really wanted to like Tosh as a character, and for a while I did, but I utterly lost respect for her when it was made clear that her first and constant reaction to emotional manipulation would be to commit treason.... despite the fact that every time she did it, she put many lives in danger.
It's not just RTD, though. I heard (admittedly second-hand) that Numb3rs had a plot [ETA: which I got wrong and was correctly cited in comments, but still boiled down to putting loyalty to friends over direct orders to Knock Something Off; it's making people unsafe.]
I'm sure that somewhere out there someone nodded because family loyalty was more important than anything.
But in this town, the politest reaction was "..." (I don't know anyone in the FBI, but I'm willing to bet that their reactions were a lot louder and a lot more profane.)
TV producers write what they think will give an emotional bang.
But the worldview is different in the company town founded by men who weren't kidding when they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to their work. Where there are memorial stars in some places because even the names can't be unclassified long enough to be remembered. Where one of the base job qualifications is to be willing to take a bullet - sometimes for someone you cannot personally stand and don't agree with.
There are loyalties more important than family. In some branches of the Government, there are loyalties more important than life. That, in a nutshell, is what TV gets wrong.