Security clearance
Hi all - I'd like your opinions on security clearances. The references needed for an "airside" pass used to cover 3 years' employment, but since 09/11, they have been increased to cover the past... 5 years!
Even before, I used to find the system very naive - who knows wether the person providing the reference is him/herself trustworthy? Now that it has to cover five years, it can create a whole host of problems (it certainly does for me) if you happen to have worked for more than a few companies. I have to make copies of the references form to cover for my previous cabin crew employers, for the job centre, for the flight schools I have attended, for any period in between two jobs (no matter how short), and to explain all that to ex-employers in foreign countries, for whom the concept of such references is completely... alien (no pun intended) - and for whom therefore it goes at the bottom of the priority mail list (provided they are allowed by local law to give such information).
In a number of Continental countries (eg. Scandinavia, France, etc), the procedure is to ask for judicial records from the Justice ministry and sometimes to surrender (temporarily) your passport so they can check if you've been to some... "dodgy" countries. Seems fair enough to me, and way less naive and time-consuming than the DETR approach.
Also, instead of increasing the length of checks post-09/11 to five years, the DETR should look deeper, not further back...