Britian's GCHQ took photos of missions of unsuspecting Yahoo! users through webcams

That's generally the case with clearances held in the commercial space, but not necessarily the case with all levels of clearance, and depends on the issuing agency - e.g. a DV issued by DBS for a List-X site is not equal to a DV issued by GCHQ et al. I think it would be foolish to think that DV is the be all and end all, as well.

But then again I might be making all of this up. If I currently held any of these clearances I'm unlikely to be talking about them on the internet, first rule of fight club and all that

You're on to something here

The latter, frankly. I don't expect much from a doctor until you get to "third line" support, i.e. the consultants, and even then I expect fairly little until proven otherwise. My personal experiences have a large role to play here, mind, I'd expect that (nay, hope that) I'm a special case here.

 

I had an interview with GCHQ and the amount of forms was unreal, they do want to know everything about you online habits even what happens if you Google yourself ect. Then the interview itself is long and split into 2 part one being with a creepy dude that asked you about your porn habits and mental well being.

The best question of the day was "You may be asked to do things you may find immoral, what do you think of doing this..."

 

Best response ever (not mine, sadly)...

"Do you view pornographic material on the internet, sir?"

"I have testicles and broadband, what do you think?"

Apparently the interviewers did find it as funny as the interviewee.

 

Yep. I was told that is a perfectly reasonable response to that question. The point is whether those facts about you are, or can be, used against you. If your name was Dereck and everyone knew you liked glory hole porn including your grandma, aka no big secret, go on ahead.

None of this can guarantee anything once you are in.

I'm sure there probably are other clearances but the point is once you've surrendered this information previous, there is not much else to go. Your trust will be built up the same as anywhere else, in baby steps. I.e. no one gives you access to all the SSH keys on day 1.

 

And there will always be a bigger brother looking at what the sibling is trying to look at. It may not be common knowledge within organisations, but since companies (including government agencies) started getting sued for the misuse of data and provisioning subject access requests, accountability etc, system snoops are inbuilt to most enterprise grade data retention systems. Those systems may not audit what you look at, but for sure they audit what you "asked"....

 

In his Laundry series of novels (basically about a British secret intelligence department that deals with occult threats to the realm --think Torchwood crossed with Harry Palmer) Charles Stross suggests that homosexual employees are obliged to be out about their sexuality. As part of their annual performance review they are obliged to attend a gay pride event at least once a year.

In his novel Cobweb, Neal Stephenson suggests that an effective way to get FBI and CIA agents to not abuse their access to confidential information is to remind them most empathically that spies and informants may have died for that information, and how people may have been tortured for it. That information cost lives. How are you going to use it?

 

Holds true in reality as well. (The bit about being out, I think the bit about occult threats and having to attend a gay pride event might be fiction though...)