I once worked for a compny that subcontracted out to the government and to comanies contracting with the government. We were bidding on a job working with some company who was making sonar systems for the nuclear subs, and I was brought along to basically represent the dev team to work on the (a?) software component. I had to get a secret security clearance, which - if you haven’t been through this - is a dozen or so pages of the last decade of everything about your life: every address you’ve lived at; a list of people and contact information who’ve known you for that entire time and who will vouch for you; every job you’ve held and contact info for the companies… everything except an actual anal probe. And remember, I had to do this just to get into the building to talk to these people. I mean, maybe not normally, but they weren’t going to waste their time talking to me if I didn’t have the clearance. Then when I got there, it had the craziest security I’d ever seen: an outside badge door, so you had to call someone to get you, a little room with a security guard station, then another secure door the security guys had to open. And then there were badge doors in the building for different sections.
The job sounded fun: I was told one phase of testing required the developers to go on a test cruise, to answer questions and debug while underway; getting to ride in a nuclear sub (without having to join the Navy) might have been worth suffering my claustrophobia and massive distrust of submarines in general. But we didn’t win the bid, and I never got to use that security clearance that was such a massive PITA to get.
Anyway, it made me very conscious of just how serious the US takes submarine security. This guy, I expect, will disappear into an oubliette and never be heard from again.