[News] Researcher loses job at NSF after government questions her role as 1980s activist

[Anti-Imperialist News]

*http://news.sciencemag.org/people-events/2014/09/researcher-loses-job-nsf-after-government-questions-her-role-1980s-activist*


  Researcher loses job at NSF after government questions her role as
  1980s activist

By
Jeffrey Mervis <http://news.sciencemag.org/author/jeffrey-mervis>
10 September 2014 5:00 am

Valerie Barr was 22 and living in New York City in 1979 when she became 
politically active. A recent graduate of New York University with a 
master's degree in computer science, Barr handed out leaflets, stood 
behind tables at rallies, and baked cookies to support two left-wing 
groups, the Women's Committee Against Genocide and the New Movement in 
Solidarity with Puerto Rican Independence. Despite her passion for those 
issues, she had a full-time job as a software developer---with 
50-plus-hour workweeks and frequent visits to clients around the 
country---that took precedence.

After a few years, she found herself devoting even less time to those 
causes. By the late 1980s, she had resumed her pursuit of an academic 
career. A quarter-century later, she's a tenured professor of computer 
science at Union College in Schenectady, New York, with a national 
reputation for her work improving computing education and attracting 
more women and minorities into the field.

That social conscience also led her to decide it was time to "give 
something back to the community." So in August 2013 she took a leave 
from Union College to join the National Science Foundation (NSF) as a 
program director in its Division of Undergraduate Education. And that's 
when her 3-decade-old foray into political activism came back to haunt her.

Federal investigators say that Barr lied during a routine background 
check about her affiliations with a domestic terrorist group that had 
ties to the two organizations to which she had belonged in the early 
1980s. On 27 August, NSF said that her "dishonest conduct" compelled 
them to cancel her temporary assignment immediately, at the end of the 
first of what was expected to be a 2-year stint.

Colleagues who decry Barr's fate worry that the incident could make 
other scientists think twice about coming to work for NSF. In addition, 
Barr's case offers a rare glimpse into the practices of the Office of 
Personnel Management (OPM), an obscure agency within the White House 
that wields vast power over the entire federal bureaucracy through its 
authority to vet recently hired workers.


            *Giving back*

Barr came to NSF under the Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA), a 
mechanism 
<http://news.sciencemag.org/policy/2013/10/special-report-can-nsf-put-right-spin-rotators-part-1> 
that allows the agency to tap the expertise of the academic community 
without requiring scientists to leave their current jobs. As an NSF 
"rotator" she managed a variety of programs, including one that provides 
scholarships for those studying how to combat cyberterrorism. A 
colleague, Jane Prey, recruited Barr and regarded her temporary move as 
quite a coup.

"You want to bring in really great people who are capable of moving the 
community forward," says Prey, a computer scientist and former academic 
who was a program manager at Microsoft before returning to NSF in 2012 
for her second stint as a rotator. "Valerie is incredibly 
talented---she's a strategic thinker who writes well and is very 
dependable. She also has an independent mind, which is important."

Prey says she's known Barr professionally for many years---both have 
been active on the Association for Computing Machinery's committee on 
women and its education council, for example---and that they began to 
socialize during their joint stint at NSF. "But she never talked about 
her political activism in the 1980s," Prey says. "It just never came up 
in conversation."


            *Who and what she knew*

Barr describes that activity as being a "worker bee" on behalf of two 
groups advocating for women and Puerto Rican independence. Federal 
investigators say those groups were affiliated with a third, the May 19 
Communist Organization (M19CO) 
<http://books.google.com/books?id=mr51AwAAQBAJ&pg=PA223&lpg=PA223&dq=May19+COmmunist+Organization&source=bl&ots=rvQZ1-KXHf&sig=Q4bly9WWpkR9xErL-fH_QC4XVu4&hl=en&sa=X&ei=mCYKVIfJGZPJgwSFw4DgBg&ved=0CE0Q6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=May19%20COmmunist%20Organization&f=false>, 
that carried out a string of violent acts, including the killing of two 
police officers and a security guard during a failed 1981 robbery of a 
Brink's truck near Nyack, New York.

Barr's first background interview was held in November 2013, 3 months 
after she began working at NSF. During that session, Barr answered "no" 
when asked if she had ever been a member of an organization "dedicated 
to the use of violence" to overthrow the U.S. government or to prevent 
others from exercising their constitutional rights.

However, according to an OPM summary report that served as the basis for 
NSF's decision, Barr was being less than forthright. "You provided no 
information regarding your affiliations with subgroups of M19CO---a 
known terrorist organization," the report notes. Her answers during the 
interview, it concluded, "constituted a deliberate misrepresentation, 
falsification, deceit, or omission of material fact."

Five months later, in April, Barr was summoned to a second interview. 
This one was conducted by a special agent for the Federal Investigative 
Services (FIS), an arm of OPM that collects information for purposes of 
both job suitability and security clearances. (FIS conducted 479,336 
such interviews last year, according to the agency's 2013 annual report 
<http://www.opm.gov/investigations/background-investigations/reference/fis-annual-report-for-fiscal-year-2013.pdf>.)

After again being asked if she had been a member of any organization 
that espoused violence, Barr was grilled for 4.5 hours about her 
knowledge of all three organizations and several individuals with ties 
to them, including the persons who tried to rob the Brink's truck. (Four 
people were found guilty of murder in that attack and sentenced to 
lengthy prison terms, including Kathy Boudin, who was released in 2003 
and is now an adjunct assistant professor of social work at Columbia 
University.) "I found out about the Brink's robbery by hearing it on the 
news, and just like everybody else I was shocked," she recalls.

But OPM apparently thought otherwise, again citing her "deliberate 
misrepresentation" in its report. Relying heavily on that investigation, 
NSF handed Barr a letter on 25 July saying that it planned to terminate 
her IPA at the end of the first year because the OPM review had found 
her to be unfit for the job. Last year, OPM reports it pursued 8520 
cases in which serious questions about a federal worker's character and 
conduct had been raised; between 100 and 200 of those cases resulted in 
a government-wide debarment.

Barr was given a chance to appeal NSF's decision, and on 11 August she 
submitted a letter stating that OPM's summary report of its 
investigation "contains many errors or mischaracterizations of my 
statements." (As is standard practice, agencies receive only a summary 
of the OPM investigation, not a full report, and lawyers familiar with 
the process say that an agent's interview notes are typically destroyed 
after the report is written.)

Barr maintains that she had been truthful throughout both interviews, 
and that "there was no material fact about these organizations for me to 
omit." Barr says she was casually acquainted with two of the convicted 
murderers, Judith Clark and Kuwasi Balagoon (née Donald Weems) but had 
no prior knowledge of their criminal activities. Clark remains in a 
maximum security prison for women in New York state, and Balagoon died 
in 1986 of an AIDS-related illness. (Barr says she wrote to Balagoon 
occasionally while he was in prison---"it would have been reprehensible 
for me to drop my correspondence with a dying person," she 
explains---and visited him once.)


            *An academic life*

Barr says the special agent's detailed questions during the second 
interview caught her by surprise. "I had not thought back on that period 
of political activity for several decades," she says.

After heading back to school, Barr earned her Ph.D. in 1996 from Rutgers 
University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and taught for 9 years at 
Hofstra University on Long Island in New York before joining Union 
College in 2004 as department chair. There she revamped the computer 
science curriculum, broadening its introductory courses to make them 
more enticing for women and minorities and strengthening collaborations 
with other departments to expose more nonmajors to computer science. 
"She completely transformed that department," says Jennifer Goodall, a 
service professor in the informatics department at the University at 
Albany, who has worked with Barr on statewide conferences to promote 
women and computing.

Goodall says she and her colleagues were very happy that Barr had 
decided to work at NSF. "We were excited because she has a 
nontraditional computer sciences background," says Goodall, who 
considers Barr a professional role model. "She's a woman, a lesbian, and 
she has a long track record of improving diversity in computer science."

Barr expected those achievements to weigh in her favor once 
investigators questioned her fitness to work at NSF. Instead, Barr 
believes those professional accomplishments may have counted against her.

In her 11 August response, Barr questioned whether the special agent who 
conducted the investigation "can be an impartial evaluator of academic 
scientists, or anyone with liberal political beliefs." As evidence, she 
points to a posting on a blog maintained by the agent, a veteran who 
served in Iraq, and his family. The item is a copy of a popular Internet 
meme about an incident that supposedly took place in an introductory 
college biology course.

According to the story, a "typical liberal college professor and avowed 
atheist" declares his intent to prove that there is no God by giving the 
creator 15 minutes to strike him from the podium. A few minutes before 
the deadline, a Marine "just released from active duty and newly 
registered" walks up to the professor and knocks him out with one punch. 
When the professor recovers and asks for an explanation, the Marine 
replies, "God was busy. He sent me."


            *OPM calls the shots*

When the federal government needs to screen newly hired workers, it 
sends OPM to do the job. Its investigative branch handles both 
background checks and security clearances. The key metric is 
suitability---which OPM defines as "a person's identifiable character 
traits and conduct sufficient to decide whether employment or continued 
employment would or would not protect the integrity or promote the 
efficiency of [federal] service."

A PowerPoint presentation on OPM's website 
<https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/employee-relations/training/presentationsuitabilitysecurity.pdf> 
titled "Taking Adverse Actions Based on Suitability or Security Issues" 
explains the process. A ruling of unsuitability must be based on one or 
more of eight factors, including criminal conduct, negligence, and 
substance abuse. Although using violence against the U.S. government is 
one such factor, the presentation notes that "[m]embership in an 
organization, alone, is not disqualifying." Mitigating circumstances, it 
adds, can include the timeliness of the unsuitable activity---"[t]he 
more recent the conduct is, the greater the potential for disqualification."

The complexity of the process puts OPM in the driver's seat, say lawyers 
who have handled many federal employment cases. "Suitability is a very 
amorphous subject, unlike security clearances, where there are clear 
rules," says Sheldon Cohen, an attorney in Oakton, Virginia, who 
specializes in security clearances. In the absence of such guidance, he 
says, individual agencies feel they have no choice but to follow OPM's 
advice.

"If OPM recommends that a person is unfit, the agency will follow that 
recommendation, period," Cohen says. "Agencies have the authority to 
reject OPM's recommendation, but they don't exercise it, ever."

An NSF official describes that relationship somewhat differently, but 
acknowledges that the end result is the same. "OPM plays no immediate 
role in the suitability determination and does not review individual 
agency determinations," says Judith Sunley, head of NSF's Division of 
Human Resource Management. But, she adds, "agency adjudicative decisions 
must be consistent with government-wide standards established by OPM. 
Once a determination of lack of suitability is made using those 
standards, agencies have very little discretion in their actions."

Attorney Joseph Kaplan, of the Washington, D.C., firm Passman & Kaplan, 
says that, in his experience, the most common reasons for a finding of 
unsuitability are lying about one's educational background, one's 
employment history, or one's criminal record. "If OPM determines that 
the person has misled or provided false information," he says, "they can 
be declared unfit for federal service."

Kaplan says he's never heard of anyone being drummed out for political 
activity that occurred decades ago. At the same time, he says, the 
government's decision is based not on anything Barr did during the 1980s 
but on how she explained those activities to federal investigators after 
coming to work at NSF. He also believes that the U.S. government has 
become more cautious since the 2001 terrorist attacks. "Ever since 9/11, 
the government has been much more vigorous in finding people unfit for 
service," Kaplan says.

/Science/Insider was unable to verify that claim. An OPM representative 
says the agency "does *not *[OPM's emphasis] track data on people found 
unsuitable for federal service." Although NSF keeps its own statistics, 
it declined to provide them. However, Sunley suggests that the numbers, 
although small, could be rising.

"NSF has been gradually upgrading its personnel security program for the 
past 2 years and those doing background investigations are being held to 
higher standards as well," she says. "Thus, numbers from past years are 
not good indicators for the future, although it is safe to say that they 
have been, and will likely remain, very small."

Cohen speculates that the massive leaks by Edward Snowden of national 
security secrets, which began in June 2013, could also have been a 
factor in NSF's decision. "If it's a matter of weighing the employee's 
statement against what the investigator says he has found, agencies will 
resolve it in favor of national security," Cohen says. "That's just how 
it is, especially after Snowden."

Not surprisingly, Barr feels such a policy doesn't do enough to protect 
innocent people like herself. Without access to the evidence that OPM 
used to make its case against her, she says, "all I have been able to do 
is repeatedly assert that I told the truth."

Barr says she is thankful that Union College has welcomed her back with 
open arms and says she will soon resume her teaching and research 
activities. In addition, she regards her year at NSF as "a very 
rewarding experience in many ways." Even so, she has written to her 
representatives in Congress and to NSF Director France Córdova asking 
them to examine what she labels an "Orwellian process" for vetting 
rotators like herself.

"We volunteer to do this," she wrote Cordova on 29 August. Until a 
better process is put in place, Barr says, "NSF runs the risk that many 
highly qualified scientists will not even consider serving as IPAs. That 
will be a tremendous loss."

Posted in People & Events 
<http://news.sciencemag.org/category/people-events>, Policy 
<http://news.sciencemag.org/category/policy> NSF Rotators 
<http://news.sciencemag.org/tags/nsf-rotators>

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