Am I a bad person if the picture of someone in the CIA crying is funny to me? Not out of malice or anything. It's just something I didn't know they did.
Do they also have little "Hang in there!" posters on the wall, too?
Not bad, just as misinformed as most folks out there about the process and requirements.
National Security is a PITA, full of cutthroat sociopaths who would eat the SV VC-types for breakfast. That is a compliment, because the work they do is broadly dark and grimly necessary, at least at the levels of global geopolitics a lot of them are expected to operate at. I washed out in contracting for much the same reason this person kept "failing" polygraphs: honesty to the point of external perceptions of naivety. The types who excel in these sectors see folks like us as doormats or tissues, and react poorly when we catch them in the act and demand anything resembling respect because they know we're a threat to the entire establishment if we're allowed to succeed.
The point of polygraphs has always been about control, and folks who resist that sort of control are incidentally highlighting themselves as being uncontrollable to power alone. The books the author links are excellent starting points for understanding the true function of a polygraph, and why more places are outlawing them as a means of trying to diversify a deeply broken and hostile security apparatus by preventing it from being a "blind fools and sociopaths-only" club.
It would seem there's a spectrum of beliefs regarding the people in the CIA, the FBI, in politics, etc. ranging from "They're just like us!" to "They're lizard people (for better or for worse)." In other words, is it the situation or is it the person/self-selection? I self-identify as uninformed about the bigger picture, but my experience working in a federally adjacent sector where all my colleagues are perfectly normal, and yet there is always above us the stench of lizardry in the decisions being made, has me believing in the hypothesis that every bureaucracy is largely staffed with normal people doing the legwork (sometimes very high level, high paying, and highly consequential legwork), and lizards controlling the brain at the management and director levels.
> I washed out in contracting for much the same reason this person kept "failing" polygraphs: honesty to the point of external perceptions of naivety.
I'm curious if you're willing to elaborate on this story. So far in my career I've yet been forced to bend my knee to a lizard, nor become one, but it sounds like you have some experience.
In my experience, 99.9% of the federal bureaucracy is regular normies just trying to make a living, pay the bills, and eke out a pension if they're lucky.
The remaining 0.1% aren't "lizard people" so much as apex predators in their fields, or political appointees. The latter are dangerous because they're fickle, vain, and narcissistic; the former are dangerous because they know where the skeletons are in the closet, where the bodies are buried in the desert, and have dirt on everyone whose corpse they didn't have to climb over into their position.
> I'm curious if you're willing to elaborate on this story.
My story is simple: I wrote extensive system documentation that the developers refused to (but gleefully took credit for), caught a colleague picking locks on secure doors and ditching work to go on dates, and noped out of the politicking between subcontractors maneuvering for a bigger cut of the pie in lieu on focusing on the mission at hand. This was not the problem.
The problem is I reported the first two, and thus became a ripe target for the third.
The movie Spy (2015) is probably the most accurate, realistic version of the CIA in cinema, replete with celebratory cakes for supervisors' birthdays and crumbling infrastructure due to insufficient funding.
Do they also have little "Hang in there!" posters on the wall, too?