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Decisions by country · Guideline B · Foreign Influence

Ties to Hong Kong in decided clearance cases

What the decided public record shows for cases in which ties to Hong Kong were alleged. Ties to any country are not themselves disqualifying, and every case turns on its own facts. This is decided history, not a prediction, and it says nothing about any nationality or community.

Decided cases

72

hearing-level decisions naming this country in the text

Granted

57%

41 granted · 31 denied or revoked

Ties living in the United States

at least 8

decisions stating expressly that the relative or contact lives in the United States, so this is a floor

The ties these cases involved

The kinds of relationship identified on Hong Kong allegations in these cases. A case can involve several, and the bars count cases rather than outcomes, so they carry no colour.
Parent in foreign country38 cases
Sibling in foreign country31 cases
Unspecified foreign relationship22 cases
Extended family in foreign country13 cases
In law in foreign country13 cases
Friend in foreign country12 cases
Foreign bank account or investment7 cases

Circumstances credited in granted cases

Circumstances the judge expressly credited among granted Hong Kong cases where that detail was extracted. Extraction covers a subset of the record, so these are raw counts and not rates.
  • deep U.S. ties · credited in 17 granted cases
  • severed foreign contact · credited in 1 granted case

Recent decided examples

  • ISCR Case No. 24-00750Granted2025

    Applicant, a 28-year-old employee of a defense contractor, sought a security clearance but faced allegations under Guideline B concerning foreign influence due to his parents' British nationality and …

  • ISCR Case No. 23-01782Granted2024

    The applicant in this case was a 73-year-old employee of a defense contractor who sought a security clearance. The allegations against him were raised under Guideline B (Foreign Influence) due to his …

  • ISCR Case No. 21-00069Denied2022

    The applicant in this case was a 36-year-old civilian analyst for a defense contractor seeking a security clearance. The adjudicative guideline at issue was foreign influence, specifically concerning …

  • ISCR Case No. 20-03202Denied2022

    The applicant in this case was a 42-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen originally from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). She applied for a security clearance on November 8, 2018, but was issued a S…

Search all Guideline B decisions mentioning Hong Kong

Other countries in the record

How these numbers are measured

Scope: decided hearing-level cases whose Guideline B allegations name this country. The country field is free text in the source, so the variants observed in the record are mapped onto one canonical name and nothing is guessed; records naming several countries in one field are excluded rather than split. A case naming two countries counts once under each. Counts of country risk and of ties living in the United States are counted only where the decision says so expressly, so both are floors. Pages exist only for countries with at least 25 decided cases.

Reading the statistics

  • Granted = access granted or continued; Denied = denied or revoked.
  • Grant rate = granted ÷ (granted + denied).
  • † marks figures based on fewer than 20 cases, too few to be reliable.
  • Hovering any rate shows its statistical range (a 95% confidence interval).
  • Figures are descriptive counts over decided, public DOHA ISCR decisions, never predictions or assessments of any pending case.

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