High court to rule on federal background probes

[Newsjock]

Source: San Francisco Chronicle

The U.S. Supreme Court agreed Monday to decide how far the government can go in looking into the backgrounds of NASA scientists and engineers, a Southern California case that also affects employees at the Ames Research Center in Mountain View.

The court granted the Obama administration's request to hear an appeal of a lower-court ruling that barred the National Aeronautics and Space Administration from conducting far-reaching inquiries into the lives of 28 workers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

The justices will hear the case in the term that starts in October, with a ruling due by June 2011.

The 28 scientists and engineers, most of them with at least 20 years' service, work for the California Institute of Technology under contract to the NASA-funded laboratory and have no access to classified information. They passed routine background checks when they were hired, but were ordered to undergo further reviews under a 2004 homeland security directive by President George W. Bush.

The directive required workers at affected agencies to authorize the government to seek information about them from any source. The sources are asked for any negative information about an employee's work, truthfulness, finances, alcohol or drug use, emotional stability or unspecified additional issues.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/03/08/BAAM1CCP63.DTL&tsp=1