Recently a federal judge blocked the government from conducting background checks of low-risk employees at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory after an appeals court said the investigations threatened the constitutional rights of workers.

Obviously I have no problem with background checks being conducted on individuals in order to protect entities from hiring bad seeds. I work for a background screening firm myself. But, how far should these background checks be taken? The workers at the JPL lab weren’t just getting your standard background check these checks supposedly involved medical records and even probed into their sex lives. According to everything I have read so far the employees were considered low level or low risk employees. I could understand doing exhaustive background investigations on employees that had access to information considered vital to national security or if they were going to be granted access to areas that might be considered vital. But how far is too far?

None of the scientists work on top-secret projects at JPL, which employs about 5,000 workers, but several are involved in high-profile missions, such as the Galileo probe to Jupiter and the Cassini spacecraft to Saturn.

I would like some opinions on this. Please feel free to leave a comment or drop me an email at crimcheck@gmail.com if you would like to add to the discussion.

Tags: background, background check, checks, employees, low risk, risk, risk employees, workers