Donald Trump may not take cybersecurity threats seriously, but the South Dakota Bureau of Information and Telecommunications does. They’ve proposed House Bill 1020, which would allow the BIT commissioner (hey! that’s my old neighbor Dave Zolnowsky!) to “require any information technology employee, new employee, or contractor to pass a background investigation.”
It’s reasonable that we should check the background of the people handling our computers (and perhaps surprising that we don’t do so already). But I have one sticking point: HB 1020 would require the checked worker to pay for the background check. The state and federal background check—running fingerprints—costs $43.25, which is an unnecessary barrier to entry to young programming grads and anyone else. The Legislature stuck teachers with that cost for one year, then backed off in 2012, restoring the provision allowing school districts to pay for those background checks. The Legislature should afford IT workers the same favor, allowing BIT to pick up the cost for the extra precautions it wants to take.
HB 1020 also leaves those background checks too open-ended. The bill says these background investigations “may be criminal or of another nature.” That “other nature” is not specified. Much as I like Dave Z., I’d like him and his successors to have some clearly outlined parameters for how and how much they can investigate their prospective hires and contractors. Even if we’re fighting Russian hackers (and doing it on our own, since Donald Trump sure won’t), we still need to respect the privacy of workers.
Let BIT pay the fee, define or strike the “of other nature” phrase, and this bill for checking IT workers’ backgrounds is o.k.
I don’t know why they couldn’t put a list of “other” type of things they might look for in the bill like credit history, civil judgments, work history verification, etc. They should be able to leave the list as non-exclusive in case there is anything else they want to check – which they can have the potential employee sign a release for to be on the safe side.
You made some good points here friend Cory but what I’m wondering is why aren’t background checks done all on state employees, contractors, and elected officials?
An undercover foreign operative would be glad to pay the forty three bucks. Multiply that times 50 and you’ve got a network of spies in IT, nationwide. Never mind. he he Just tryin’ to scare the timid and help them come back to the planet. Charging job applicants to put in an application is as shady as landlords charging for a rental application when there’s a rental shortage.
Cory, I’m going to take issue with your criticism of the background check being too open-ended under the proposed law. The problem is the scope of the background check should be variable based upon the level of access and the nature of the data that the employee has access to. Given that, you can’t write the law to anticipate all of the considerations for the variables that would come into play. For example, if the IT worker is dealing with safeguarding important financial information or citizen information like social security numbers that could be exploited by bad actors, they should have to pass a higher level of scrutiny than a person who does not have access to highly confidential information in the course of their employment.
If someone wants to apply for a job dealing with highly sensitive or confidential information, they should expect a confidential examination of their personal background. If they are not willing to have their background examined, then they should not apply for the job. You can protect individual privacy, while at the same time maintaining the security of government information. If you don’t allow sufficient examination of potential new hires, you could end up with the privacy of thousands or millions of people being abused. Therefore, any such law should lean more toward safeguarding critical governmental information over the rights of individual employee privacy. In this case, clearly, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
PS, We have to weigh the fact that the job applicant can decide whether they want to give up some level of privacy to apply for the job against the fact that citizens with private information in government databases have no such choice as to whether their information is held by the government. The scales clearly tilt toward protecting the latter over the former.
Ror, I would put criminal and any other background check normal and customary for the job. I think the vagueness is different jobs might require different levels of security clearance.
Mark, for the same reason business doesn’t do a background check on every applicant for every job. Its overkill. You could literally spend a millions a year on such checks.
P.S. I’m with Darin in case my comments weren’t clear which is likely. He said it better than me.
These wannabe employees of our state government should have to submit to urinalisis and anal probes just like the people who are insaner than most want to do to the welfare folk. If you are on the public dole then you are on the public dole, right?
Hmm… HB 1025 just popped into the hopper this afternoon. HB 1025 would require background checks of all employees, applicants, licensees, and vendors of the South Dakota Lottery. Unlike HB 1020, HB 1025 would allow the Lottery to pay for the background check.
Same with HB 1033 requiring background checks of all executive branch personnel and contractors who handle confidential IRS information: it allows the state to cover the fee.
Don’t get me wrong: I understand the need for background checks in sensitive jobs (I’m still waiting for the opportunity to complete the background check on our incoming Commander in Chief by reviewing his tax returns). I wonder, though: does the state have any formal framework of security clearances?