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Friday Fun Thread for September 20, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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when he was 15 years old

That kind of changes the whole picture. It's beyond idiotic to hold a grown man, years later, for shit he did on the internet when being a horny teenager. Ever more idiotic, they apparently allowed him to work for 2.5 years, presumably accessing all that top secret information, and then suddenly they started digging into his behavior as 15 years old? So many levels of pure dumb.

At least from the complaint, Bierly's work history only included :

Mr. Bierly worked as an intern with the U.S. Cybercommand for a summer internship from June 15, 2020 through July 17, 2020. During the summer internship with JWAC, Mr. Bierly worked from May 24, 2021 through August 13, 2021. Lastly, On November 18, 2022, after working in his position with the Air Force from August 15, 2022, Mr. Bierly was issued a Statement of Reasons (SOR) from DCSA notifying him of the DCSA’s intent to revoke Mr. Bierly’s eligibility for access to classified information.

Most of the time during his probationary period he worked at a university tech support field, according to his LinkedIn, and for the internships or three months at the job there's a lot of restrictions about what new hires get. There's a fair argument that the DoD needs to figure out how to handle the broader class of stuff at a more reasonable rate -- taking three+ years to onboard new people is a problem! -- but this sorta one-hand-can't-find-the-other is why those prolonged probationary periods exist.

On the other side, in the SOR letter the investigator claims to have understood this to include continued and recent viewing of porn involving 16-year-old characters as recently as a month before the polygraph (page 147 here, cw: more details about a dude jerking it than I wanted to know). Bierly's complaint alleges that the polygraphers inserted that age as an assumption for everything but his admission while 15-years-old, though, and his more recent viewings had been focused on 18+ characters.

There are even some technical reasons with how e621's tag and blacklist system worked at the time where that confusion might be reasonable! Or the investigators could have gotten a face full of prohibited content when checking the normie keywords Bierly provided, had to soak their computers in bleach, and either not believed or wanted to take it out on him.