How To Kill A Dot Com With One Email
from the terrorists! dept
A company called ClearedPeople.com has been trying to set up an online job site for people with security clearance looking for jobs. Seems simple enough. Last week, the company sent emails to government agencies telling them about ClearedPeople's existence. Someone at the Air Force received the email and send out a warning saying that the company might actually be "associated with hostile intelligence agencies" looking to recruit spies with U.S. security clearance. It turns out that that is not true. However, many assumed that the Air Force email warning wasn't just a "could be" and instead was a fact. Suddenly, the folks at ClearedPeople started receiving email and phone calls accusing them of being terrorists. It seems like a lot of things went wrong here. The company probably shouldn't have sent out their blast email, and the Air Force person who sent the warning should have worded it more carefully. Most of all, though, the people who simply assumed that the "warning" was factual need to calm down and learn to read.
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bad idea
Here's the real problem: so ClearedPeople.com isn't knowingly doing anything bad, but what's to stop some 'foreign agent of influence' from starting up a defense contractor as a front and using clearedpeople.com to 'recruit' likely targets for, um, whatever nefarious purposes people with clearances are usually targeted for?
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