Mars: Over 100 NASA Scientists Quit Or Retire Early Over ‘Security Obsession’ With Mars Rover – What Are ‘They’ So ‘Obsessed’ About?

http://beforeitsnews.com/space/2012/12/mars-over-100-nasa-scientists-quit-or-retire-early-over-security-obsession-with-mars-rover-what-are-they-so-obsessed-about-2450346.html            

Mars: Over 100 NASA Scientists Quit Or Retire Early Over ‘Security Obsession’ With Mars Rover – What Are ‘They’ So ‘Obsessed’ About?

Monday, December 3, 2012 19:12

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Is something HUGE going on with Mars that NASA and the Department of Homeland Security DO NOT want the public to know about? Due to NASA’s new found ‘security obsession’ with the Mars Rover, over 100 NASA scientists and engineers have recently either quit their jobs or retired early. What in the world are NASA and the Department of Homeland Security so obsessed about with Mars and the Mars Rover? According to this story at This Can’t Be Happening:

“Thanks to the zealous wackos at the Department of Homeland Security, back in 2007 during the latter part of the Bush administration an order went out that all workers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena–an organization that is run under contract to NASA by the California Institute of Technology, had to be vetted for high security clearance in order to continue doing their jobs. Never mind that not one of them was or is engaged in secret activities (NASA is a rigorously non-military, scientific agency which not only publishes all its findings, but which invites the active participation of scientists from around the world). In order to continue working at JPL, even scientists who had been with NASA for decades were told they would need a high-level security badge just to enter the premises. To be issued that badge, they were told they would need to agree undergo an intensive FBI check that would look into their prior life history, right back to college.”

Now, who would blame the many scientists and engineers at JPL who took this as an extreme invasion of their privacy? To get their clearance, TPTB were going to contact their neighbors and old colleagues to be interrogated about their drug-use, drinking habits, arrest records as kids, all the countless things that are looked into when doing a high-security background check. Why would NASA scientists be subject to the same prying invasion of their privacy that they would get if they were applying for jobs in the CIA or the Secret Service?

More from This Can’t Be Happening:

“Everyone who wanted to continue doing space science at JPL was told they had to submit to a security investigation.

The cost of this idiocy, which was aggressively pursued to a final pyrrhic victory in the High Court by the Obama Department of Justice (sic), has been grievous, as some 100 veteran scientists at JPL have quit or taken early retirement, rather than open their lives to the FBI.”

What in the world are NASA and the Department of Homeland Security HIDING up on Mars? Every day lately, we are learning more and more via NASA’s own photos, something BIG is going on up there! The security obsession being displayed by NASA and the DHS is just more proof that something HUGE is up. Americans deserve answers! Once again we are playing the whipping boy for a government out of control that does not have our best interests in mind. We pay their salaries, why shouldn’t we DEMAND answers from them or withhold their funding? These out of control, zealous wacko’s need to be broken! 

To close this story, I’ll leave you with a comment from a former NASA employee and a closing statement from This Can’t Be Happening.:

Not everyone who quit over this issue was a scientist. Susan Foster, a senior science writer at JPL, began her career there working as a secretary in 1968, even before the first Apollo moon landing. She says she quit solely because of the NASA requirement that she submit to a “waiving of my Fourth Amendment rights or be denied access to the facility” where she had worked for 44 years. She is currently unemployed and looking for work.

What upset her most, she says, was NASA’s plan to use the information it obtained on its scientists’ and employees’ lives to create a “suitability matrix,” which would be used to see if they merited continued employment. In questioning JPL management, Foster says people learned that this “suitability matrix” would be considering things like “whether JPL scientists had participated in political demonstrations that could qualify in NASA’s scheme of things as disorderly conduct, disturbing the peace, resisting arrest, unlawful assembly” — all activities that she says many of JPL’s scientists had engaged in over the years. Says Foster, “Criteria such as ‘attitude’ are pretty frightening in their subjectivity, and ‘striking against the government’ is chilling to anyone who has supported, say, a legitimate teachers’ action.”

This disaster at JPL is a classic case of the US security state run amok, and provides yet another example of how the Obama administration, which came into office in 2009 promising to return the country to some kind of sanity and respect for the Constitution, has instead driven 100 invaluable scientists out of JPL, weakening the nation’s already struggling space program, and has put hundreds of scientists’ lives, and the lives of their families, at risk.