federal employees

Awhile back I wrote a three part series on an attack on civil liberties that has started with NASA (including my wife), the Bureau of Land Management and the Department of Education, but in theory affects all Federal employees and all contractors with access to Federal facilities. (Part III with links to parts I and II can be found here). I should note that this series was one of our most read series of articles ever, even getting the attention of mainstream media and raising the morale of the NASA employees involved.

The gist of the attack on Civil Liberties is something called Homeland Security Presidential Directive #12. In itself it is reasonable, merely mandating a more uniform way of issuing ID badges to people with access to Federal facilities. But the method of implementation in essence treats ALL Federal employees as people working on projects of a sensitive nature for Homeland Security. The process of issuing ID badges requires ALL Federal employees (though the implementation has been spotty so far) to sign a waiver allowing the Federal government to investigate ANY aspect of their life if they deem necessary with no due process (outlined in Part I and III of my series), and has aspects that in theory bars all gays from Federal employment, something that is a part of the process but has not been applied against gays to date as far as I know (this is covered in Part II of my series). For more details, please read my earlier series.