Comment by frisco
14 years ago
One thing I've always wondered about was what the President's clearance consists of. Are there things he doesn't have access to? Does he know he doesn't have access? Can he see a list of every secret program, but perhaps not get details? Does he have totally unfettered access to everything the US does?
Edit: the corollary is, "how many people have access to everything?" or alternatively, "if the president doesn't, does anyone have access to everything?"
Not being the President, this is purely speculation, but I would guess:
There are many things the President probably does not have unfettered access to.
There are many, many, many trainings and shit you go through that reinforce that seniority and superiority do not in themselves constitute the 'need to know' for classified information.
There should NOT be someone who has access to everything, as the entire point of the compartmentalization is that no one breach can be used against everybody/everything. I have a suspicion that there are actually compartments which are mutually exclusive - if you're in Compartment X, you are, by definition, not allowed in Compartment Y, specifically for that segmentation reason.
There exist a number of "super users," I believe their role is to minimize redundancy of effort. Even if someone had access to everything, the amount of data generated far exceeds what one person can handle.
I'd imagine such super users get Name/Codeword/Purpose briefs to cross reference, rather than access to the information itself, as clearance to know is not a need to know.
I can think of two rationales for restricting the President's access to information.
One is plausible deniability: there's no need to expose the president personally to every misdeed everyone working for the government may have committed. Yes, that's a cynical, realpolitik type of answer that really pisses off people on HN, but it's true.
The other is simply that the President makes decisions at such a high level that low level information simply isn't helpful to him. The federal government is huge. The President can't function without hundreds of people who spend all day aggregating and summarizing information. This invests a lot of power in the aggregators and summarizers.