Mathematician colleagues have encouraged me to apply to the summer SCAMP programs at the Center for Communications Research (CCR), or to consult for CCR, since they thought I would be interested in the mathematics problems worked on there.
Over the years, I've looked at the security clearance forms. To consult for CCR, I'd need to provide lots of personal information that I didn't think was any of their business, obtain permission to travel (at least to certain places) even after severing ties with CCR, and promise never to divulge their secrets. Some of the promises were irrevocable, so one couldn't say "Oh, I made a mistake. I've changed my mind. Let's clean the slate and roll back time to before I agreed to this."
My recollection is that one had to give all of one's telephone numbers and addresses for the previous 15 years. In the years after I got my PhD, I moved from place to place, changing phone numbers each time. I surely couldn't remember all those phone numbers.
I was left with the feeling that I could be hung for treason if I forgot a former phone number or inadvertently broke a promise. There probably wasn't actually any wording about hanging, but I'm pretty sure the word "treason" was there, and I found it both memorable and scary.
When I complained that I didn't see why my work colleagues had a right to know details of my personal life, a Director of CCR La Jolla assured me that the completed security forms are kept in an ultra-secure vault for which the only people who have access are a small number of staff who have a need to know and who are required to keep it confidential.
When I went to CCR Princeton in March of 2001 to gave a talk, in a conversation in a hallway the Director and some members encouraged me to consult for CCR. I told them some of my misgivings about signing the security forms.
"It seems to me that I would need to sign away much of the Bill of Rights. I like the Bill of Rights, and I don't want to give it up," I said. The CCR members didn't seem pleased with that response, possibly taking it as an accusation that they didn't care about the Bill of Rights as much as I did. But at that moment I realized how strong an attachment I had to the U.S. Constitution and the principles held dear by the country's founders.
I expressed concern about the scary threats of treason if I misremembered something and accidentally filled out a form incorrectly. They thought that was a silly concern; no one would punish me for an honest mistake.
I asked, "What happens when, sometime in the future, we have an evil government that we can't trust, and it uses such a mistake as an opportunity to harm me?"
"That will never happen," the Director and his co-workers replied, laughing at what they probably thought was unreasonable paranoia. I wasn't as trusting as they were (and it's now tempting to say "I told you so").
Referring to a then-recent revelation, I said it wasn't so clear to me that it was sporting for the U.S. to bug the Soviet Embassy; after all, the U.S. hosts the U.N., and a good host doesn't spy on its guests. The CCR Princeton Director then agreed with me that if those were my views, it wouldn't be a good idea for me to work for them.
On September 12, 2001, stunned by the September 11 attacks, some friends and I wondered what we could do to help. One of them thought this might be a good time to start consulting for CCR, and we dug up an application and the security clearance forms one of us had been given. We paged through them to see what they entailed, and came across a (presumably misplaced) filled-out page of personal information for a mathematician I vaguely knew. So much for the locked vault. That was enough to stop me from applying.