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In honor of the United States’s birth, I would like to point your attention to what I believe to be one of the greatest communities of government workers and public servants on the internet: The r/SecurityClearance subreddit.
r/SecurityClearance is a group of 53,000 people who have or who want to get security clearances to access classified information in sensitive government or government contractor roles, which is a notoriously invasive and paranoia-filled process. Like all online communities, the stories here must be taken with a grain of salt, but I have been obsessed with this unhinged corner of Reddit for the last few months, and I implore you to check it out.
The security clearance process is basically a very involved background check that includes interviewing the candidate and people who have known them at various points in their life (I have been interviewed by the government about people I was not even particularly close with, because I knew them in elementary school). During this process, the government attempts to assess whether the candidate can be trusted with classified information and also whether they have anything that makes them blackmailable. This means that you are often ineligible for a clearance if you have done drugs, committed crimes, have particular sympathies to foreign governments, and things like this.