Author Archive

Marko Hakamaa

Marko Hakamaa served in various military police positions with the United States Army worldwide for 22 years before retiring in 2006 as a Master Sergeant. Afterwards, he transitioned into the civilian workforce as a contractor background investigator for the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) before entering civil service as a Security Specialist in 2009.

Background Investigations

Now that we are in the new fiscal year, the new billing rates for background investigations and various other checks conducted by the National Background Investigations Bureau have kicked in. According to Federal Investigative Notice (FIN) 17-04 issued last March, the costs for all five tiers of investigations and reinvestigations

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Security Clearance Process

For a long while now security clearance reform proponents  have talked about using continuous evaluation processes in lieu of 5 or 10 year reinvestigations to find and weed out those clearance holders who might be less than worthy of having access to classified information. The Defense Security Service (DSS) recently

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Security Clearance Process

The proposed Fiscal Year 2018 National Defense Authorization Act passed by the House and currently pending Senate approval contains a few sections pertaining to improving and expediting the process by security clearance processes. The House Armed Services Committee (ASC) noted that while some progress has been made by the National

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Obtaining Security Clearance

Most of the case examples highlighted on this site are clearance denials upheld by the Defense Office of Hearing and Appeals (DOHA). Here is a good example of a case where the applicant had issues concerning recent cocaine and then lying about it, but was able to mitigate the issues and be

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