The Federal Bureau of Investigation needs to hire more hackers — and that means changing the rules about how much pot you can smoke on the job.
“I have to hire a great work force to compete with those cybercriminals, and some of those kids want to smoke weed on the way to the interview,” FBI Director James B. Comey told the Wall Street Journal.
Right now, you can work for the FBI if you have abstained from pot smoking in the last three years, a more relaxed stance that came into effect in 2007.
That’s not laid back enough, though, to roll with the times: Comey needs to hire about 2,000 people, pronto. And many of them may come from the doobie-smoking, Mountan Dew-imbibing coding crowd.
It’s a sea change for an governmental agency known in the day of J. Edgar Hoover for a lengthy dress code that involved wing tips you could use as a mirror and buzz cuts. While modern G-Men (and women) may sport more casual gear like chinos and logo windbreakers, there’s still an expectation that government officials investigating crimes will be pretty straight laced. Or at least not breaking any laws. Considering that pot smoking is currently only legal in Washington state and Colorado, it seems to usher in a new do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do era.
The changes would make the FBI more lenient than the CIA, which requires no drug use for a year prior to hiring.
What do you think? Does America’s fight against cyberterrorism rest on turning a blind eye to pot smokers?
Via: WSJ
