Fired - The military does not like this board

Originally posted by bigneum_808
im in the millitary not intel or anything and visit this site often at work on my lunch break! looks like i better go back to good ol yahoo games!

Thats my point you just don't get fired for visiting web sites unless you are using company time.

Originally posted by marg6043
downkaos,

First of all what type of clearance did you have, and If you were working for a contractor what are the stipulations of your contract or do you have a contract at all.?

It does not sound right? Why? I am not going to go into details but I know.

It was more in your dismissal than just surfing a web site.

Top Secret

Originally posted by marg6043

Originally posted by bigneum_808
im in the millitary not intel or anything and visit this site often at work on my lunch break! looks like i better go back to good ol yahoo games!

Thats my point you just don't get fired for visiting web sites unless you are using company time.

I had the clearance to surf any website at any time. That was part of my job. But I only surfed ATS on my lunch break.

Originally posted by gurnio

I wish I could go into more detail but a lot of the things we talked about were classified and I wouldn't put it past them to arrest me for making classified material public

Neither would I,... in fact I pray to God that they would.
You expect them to send you flowers?

I'm having a hard time believing a "Senoir[sic] System Administrator" could misspell the word "senior" three times.

Maybe they had other reasons to fire you...

(and btw "dosen't" is spelled "doesn't")

I have always spelled "senoir" wrong for some reason...

Sorry bud.

If you have access to sensitive information, you probably already know why they gave you the pink slip. I am getting the overwhelming impression that there's more to this story than is appearing in this thread.

Bear in mind that commiserating here doesn't exactly bolster your case for a wrongful termination.

If I was working for a government agency at the moment, there's no way in heaven or in hell I would ever so much as breeze through here. I mean, come on, this is a site where speculation and innuendo about revelations of classified material abounds.

You would be better off hanging out on 1337.com or some warez sites, for the love of Jehoshephat.

I'm thinking "terminated for lack of common sense".

Odd, we have had (and still do have) quite a few members who are in or involved in the military and many who regularly post from .mil or other .gov IPs. Never heard of anyone getting in any sort of trouble for doing so, what exactly were you looking at?

I will speculate that your *.mil and *.gov customers fall into three primary categories:

1) People who have no professional interest in this site, and whose participation is not considered a threat to national security.

2) People who have a professional interest in this site and others like it, for one reason or another, and whose lurking or participation are authorized.

3) People who are skating on thin ice.

I love this website, but I will reiterate that if I was working on something sensitive, I would avoid this place like the plague. The risks dramatically outweigh the rewards.

To those reading this who may fall into Category 3, I urge you to be careful and consider your priorities. Your work on sensitive programs will not last forever. Don't take unnecessary risks.

Instead, wait until you don't know anything, then come back and pontificate like me.

They could have given you the choise: leave ATS for good and get rid of any trace or its your job. If you said something you shouldn't have then they have a right if you agreed not to.

don't listen to people who dont believe your story. Don't feel as though you have to prove yourself, if your lying, thats your problem and we'll never know, if not, its their problem. When it comes down to it, your post is your post plain and simple.

did they not give you a more detailed reason for firing you? visiting ATS seems a bit superficial, did you not go "what the hell are you talking about? why exactly are you firing me?!" thats what i would have done.

TextI had the clearance to surf any website at any time. That was part of my job. But I only surfed ATS on my lunch break.

The reason I asked is not because I wanted to know your busisness but because my husbad is a retaired marine he works in a Milirary base he is more than just computer person he analyzes sensible data and he also have a cleareance, actually he talks about ATS at work and others search ATS in his workplace and they do it at work the only thing they do not do is posting or sing in at work they just search and none of the had gotten fire.

It is logical to assume that the US Air Force is much more sensitive to the subjects discussed in ATS than any other branch of the US military; simply because they most likely have more information about UFOs and aliens than any other governmental agency, barring the feds over at installations like S4 (which actually includes elements of the Air Force).

When the well-known TV producer and journalist, Linda Moulton Howe, was shown a top secret document called "Briefing Paper For The President Of The United States Of America On Identified Aerial Vehicles," it was at an Air Force Base in New Mexico -- not a Marine Corp base, Army base, Naval facility, etc.

The situation of being abruptly fired from the Air Force simply from viewing this forum and posting an introduction only furthers the notion that there is an apparent uneasiness among higher-ups in the USAF with the sensitive topics discussed here which they prefer we didn't know anything about.

The situation of being abruptly fired from the Air Force simply from viewing this forum and posting an introduction only furthers the notion that there is an apparent uneasiness among higher-ups in the USAF with the sensitive topics discussed here which they prefer we didn't know anything about.

Ok let see that your scenario is true, but you can still get hold of ATS at home so what is the difference.

Hey, this site isn't bad. It's a news site. I get news here first before I see it anywhere.

Originally posted by marg6043

The situation of being abruptly fired from the Air Force simply from viewing this forum and posting an introduction only furthers the notion that there is an apparent uneasiness among higher-ups in the USAF with the sensitive topics discussed here which they prefer we didn't know anything about.

Ok let see that your scenario is true, but you can still get hold of ATS at home so what is the difference.

Who's to say that the government doesn't at least occasionally monitor the website activity of employees at home that have top secret clearances and work in sensitive positions? They certainly have the technology available to them to do so!

It appears that as soon as they get wind of the affiliation, be it from home or from work (or even during lunch), they act on it.

Sorry to hear you got fired; hopefully you'll have good luck finding good (hopefully better) work soon.

Just general words of advice:

A) In any office environment office politics are always more important than you think they actually are, and this goes double for people who are handling more technical matters (as opposed to more customer interaction / meeting sort of things). Trust me, I'm as geeky and antisocial as they come, but I've learned that failing to pay attention to the office politics and personalities at your place of work is gonna always wind up hurting you in the long run.

B) It sounds like the "other guy" -- the security engineer -- didn't really know his stuff, i.e., he's probably incompetent. Now, people can handle their own incompetence in a lot of different ways, including:

i) ignoring it / being ignorant
ii) recognizing it and working overtime to learn the stuff, get competent, etc.,
iii) same as ii), but acknowledging it to superiors, etc.,
iv) trying to hide the evidence and keep superiors from knowing, etc.,

and it sounds like the security engineer was probably aware he didn't really know much about current security practices, and was afraid his bosses were going to find out.

Here's where you come in: in a perfect world, when you're like

"yo, your info's out of date by 10 years"

he'd be like

"dude, thanks man, I should totally start getting back up to speed. thanks dude"

but instead he was probably thinking

"uh oh, this guy knows more than I do, he'll probably be after my job soon, and then I'll get passed up for promotion"

and then he thought

"uhm, he said he knew some hackers...maybe I can convince OSI to investigate him and get him fired"

and then yeah, he went and did that.

As a lot of people here have already said, once some OSI guy sees you're visiting here a lot -- with a name of abovetopsecret.com -- that's suspicious enough to freak the guy out, and even if you're being totally harmless it shows bad judgment to visit on work hours, so that's probably enough to get you fired.

Worse, though, is that if the OSI guy finds all this stuff about you, and you're like,

"man, I just go for fun, I'm not a hacker, and I keep my mouth shut about what I know"

and he's like

"dude, I see, oh well, sorry to bother you"

if you turn out to BE a hacker -- or even if the network gets hacked -- now the OSI guy's boss is gonna be like

"yo OSI man, you let this HACKER keep working here, nice move, I'm demoting you"

(never mind that you're not a hacker)

so now the OSI guy has to cover his own behind and the safest thing for him to do is just to fire you.

So, here you are: fired, and without a chance to explain yourself. I wouldn't read anything into it more than bad office politics and the CYA (cover your "behind") principle at work.

So my $0.02 is: if you're gonna stay in a technical field, learn to pay more attention to office politics and learn to anticipate how people are going to react to things; any good hacker will tell you social engineering >= technical skills, and the same goes double in the real world.

I never liked office politics and I'm really no good at them. I prefer to work hard and do a good job.

For those of you who doubt me I'm sure a mod could look up all the ips I have logged in with and see I was coming from a .mil.

Secondly it's not like I visited this site everyday from work I think I visited it once or twice. Everybody did their surfing a lot of guys looked at fark all day. Part of my job was monitoring was tracking where everyone went on the web so I was constantly going to porn sites and such to block them at the proxies.


Ohh and btw if any of you ever see a military proxy servers log the most visited website you'll see it......blackplanet heh

[edit on 21-7-2004 by downkaos]

Originally posted by superduperman
don't listen to people who dont believe your story. Don't feel as though you have to prove yourself, if your lying, thats your problem and we'll never know, if not, its their problem. When it comes down to it, your post is your post plain and simple.

did they not give you a more detailed reason for firing you? visiting ATS seems a bit superficial, did you not go "what the hell are you talking about? why exactly are you firing me?!" thats what i would have done.

No thats what bugs me the most.....that was the whole reason for my departure. I was never sat down and told "Look here are the reasons we don't want you here anymore". I was told by my boss "You went and visited a website called ATS so the Air Force and OSI don't want you in here anymore.". Peroid, end of discussion.

Originally posted by marg6043

TextI had the clearance to surf any website at any time. That was part of my job. But I only surfed ATS on my lunch break.

The reason I asked is not because I wanted to know your busisness but because my husbad is a retaired marine he works in a Milirary base he is more than just computer person he analyzes sensible data and he also have a cleareance, actually he talks about ATS at work and others search ATS in his workplace and they do it at work the only thing they do not do is posting or sing in at work they just search and none of the had gotten fire.

Sorry to tell you but the marines, army, navy are all behind the times in computer technology. The Air Force (and any other service member should abmit this to you) is #1 when it comes to information security.

Lets just say I use to see lists of comprimised machines and there was hardly ever an air force computer in those lists.

It could have to do with your clearance. Now, you said Top Secret, but as you know they go deeper than Top Secret. you have SBI, SCI and tons of extensions on to that. Maybe it has something to do with a specific designation that you had? No idea without knowing what you were approved for. Since we do not have a "Need to know", you probably cannot go into details either.

It could also be for other reasons that they did not like you personally for some reason and that was their only LEGAL way to fire you.

Just some thoughts