A security clearance requires that the government know more about you than just the background-level life events of yours that they passively subscribe to.
All they need to know for a plain-old no-clearance public-servant position is that you're not beholden to a foreign power (e.g. part of a foreign gang, or in debt to a major foreign corporation.)
There's an easy (though imperfect) heuristic for determining whether you're potentially beholden to a foreign power, from the data they already have: the addresses you've lived at, your job history, and your arrest record. Just join that set to the set of organizations they're tracking as catspaws for foreign powers [and their active locations], count the joined rows, and you have a log-probability that you've ever had the opportunity to interact with someone who might have had cause to convince you to work for a foreign power.
This sounds too simplistic. There are other factors, like large debts (domestic, foreign, or otherwise), extra-marital affairs, etc. that could make someone easy to turn in the future.
At this point I think it depends on what type of security clearance you're talking about now. The above sounds more like checks done for a CIA analyst than for a embassy drywall contractor...
All they need to know for a plain-old no-clearance public-servant position is that you're not beholden to a foreign power (e.g. part of a foreign gang, or in debt to a major foreign corporation.)
There's an easy (though imperfect) heuristic for determining whether you're potentially beholden to a foreign power, from the data they already have: the addresses you've lived at, your job history, and your arrest record. Just join that set to the set of organizations they're tracking as catspaws for foreign powers [and their active locations], count the joined rows, and you have a log-probability that you've ever had the opportunity to interact with someone who might have had cause to convince you to work for a foreign power.