Applying for Government Job? Your Nude Selfies May Be Problematic

LOS ANGELES—Nude photography has been democratized by smartphones, with roughly 40 percent of American men and women between ages 18 and 24 saying they have not only taken photographs of themselves nude, but “sexted” the image to someone else, according to a recent study. Nor is the phenomenon confined to the young. The same study showed approximately one of every four Americans over the age of 45 saying they had also shared a nude selfie. Another recent study found that women in particular found sexting nude selfies to be “empowering.” In fact, women were four times as likely as men to say that they felt empowered by sending someone naked photos of themselves. But for people who may want to work for the United States government, in jobs that require any kind of security clearance, those increasingly commonplace nude selfies can turn out to be job-killers, according to an attorney who specializes in the legalities around security clearances. “I don’t judge my clients, but you’d better believe that the over-65 crowd often deciding these appeals [for clearances] thinks of nude selfies like their parents thought of ‘the devil’s music,’ rock and roll,” wrote lawyer Sean Bigley, in an essay for the site Clearance Jobs, which covers the thousands of federal employees who require security clearances. The site currently lists openings for more than 52,000 government jobs with some level of security clearance. But those jobs will probably not go to anyone with a nude selfie on his or her phone according to Bigley. “The government generally finds out about the existence of nude selfies in one of two ways,” Bigley explains, saying that a hiring agent for a clearance job will administer a “lifestyle” polygraph test that could detect whether an applicant is hiding nude photos.  But simply asking the job applicant, “is there anything about you not generally known that could be used for blackmail?” has also elicited admissions about nude photos, Bigley said, noting that the question “throws a lot of people for a loop.” But lying about a nude selfie is highly inadvisable, the lawyer says. While the existence of a naked iPhone photo can sometimes be “mitigated” in the security clearance process, answering “no” to the blackmail only to have a nude selfie found later “is a guaranteed recipe for career-killing integrity questions.” The four main categories that are considered “blackmail material” by government hiring agencies are “a secret love-child, an illicit affair, serious undiscovered criminal conduct, and – you guessed it – photographs or video of the individual nude or engaged in otherwise compromising activity,” Bigley wrote. Photo By BP22Heber / Wikimedia Commons