As a student, I am not affected by this much. But for the adults which I have to work with, I suspect they will feel the same way as most adults here have felt. Giving away one's SSN and being checked for background will just make the adults think that FIRST is too ideal and intrusive. Something similar happened here to a track coach this year, who had drug charges and jail time more than a decade ago. So what? Since then, he's become respected and reformed. When the school district brought up his past again, it was an embarassment and he is currently suing the school district. FIRST, like the school district, shouldn't need to look into someone's past because it's the present and not past that matters.
As Dave mentioned, many companies might not allow employees to give out information concerning work. When I read this, I thought about something else related to companies. If that adult has been working at a reputable company for years, then he/she has already been screened enough to be accepted by that company and acknowledged to have a suitable background or current state of mind/behavior to be working with other people in an environment similar to that of robotics. Why ask them to go through a screening process again? The only case with which I see a useful purpose for screening would be for college-student mentors. They would be the most foreign (save the few that lived there) and new to the community. Not that I have anything against any college-student mentors
And not that I approve of screening at all.