There is no way this Snowden guy is on the level.

[longship]

67. Well my neighbors from 15 years earlier were interviewed by the FBI.

That's what it normally takes for such clearances. It's not like a job interview. They pour over your history, which you have to report in detail. Then they check it out. In detail! And that can involve FBI; they're the ones with jurisdiction.

It's not at all a trivial matter.

And I was working for a private company.

Boeing Military Airplane Company. Now gone, but at the time were the big military contractor under the Boeing label. There were secret projects all over the place. We called them black hole projects because once an employee got sucked into one of them they disappeared. You never saw them again. It's not like they wacked them or anything. They just probably all retire out of the project or are moved to another Boeing location. It's all hush-hush. Nobody paid it any attention because it was fairly common.

I worked with a couple of people who came out of such projects (so it was said) but one didn't talk about such things.

Having worked for years under that umbrella I am skeptical of Snowden's narrative.