Comment by secthrowaway
14 years ago
I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding about how things become classified.
see previous comment here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3298594
Keep in mind that there are probably north of 1 in 150 Americans with current access to classified material. It's a huge number and just because you aren't in the club doesn't mean it's really all that hard to get in. Get a job that gets you a clearance and you can see what's on the other side of the curtain. Believe it or not, it's amazingly mundane.
This comment is a little misleading; clearances don't give you unfettered access to classified information, they only allow you to receive whatever information you have a "need to know". A security clearance alone doesn't give you access to anything, it just tells the government you've had a background check and could potentially be trusted with certain information.
Well...it can be conflicting. At the Secret level, you tend to have access to much wider ranging information than in a SAP. A person working Intelligence in Japan for example, might also have access to information about Lithuania at that level. In fact, they probably do.
At TS it starts to get more restricted. You have more ability to request access to things outside your general area, but you may/may not get approved.
In the Compartments, my experience has been they are surprisingly global in nature, but focused in content. Meaning I can pretty much get that "kind" of information for any place on the planet, but it's only that "kind" of information. There's some exceptions, but not many.
SAP programs tend to be where it gets very focused. Often because they represent information only collected in your area using only a specific means. So there isn't a global collection of that kind of data -- well, there might be, but you aren't in all of the SAP programs to try and figure it out.
Well this is certainly only partly true. The difference between a generic Secret clearance and the level of clearance talked about in the article is probably bigger than the difference between having a secret clearance and not having one at all. I got my first secret clearance in a month or so, with the interim clearance coming in only a couple of weeks. Hardly anything that would be considered "oh cool!" is labelled Secret. Once you get to the up levels of clearances you start to have a harder and harder time getting and keeping that clearance. You make it sound easy, when in fact it isn't. I was on a small team and a surprisingly large percentage of people we tried to bring onto the team got their request for clearance denied. If you are trying to get a TS/SCI clearance and have a foreign born wife, or too much debt, or a gambling problem, or you used drugs and didn't announce that on your form, or you were completely sketched out on the polygraph, boom, no clearance for you (obviously those are just examples, not set in stone).
Also, once at the TS/SCI level and above everything in compartmentalized. It isn't as if you get the clearance, get some password to some digital book of secrets and all of a sudden you know what really went down at Area 51.
I'm actually surprised by this. I work with a ton of people with foreign born wives (many not even green carded yet) -- soldiers tend to marry where they are first stationed.
Also, I work with plenty of people with TS/SCIs who have used drugs in the past.
The key is just being honest with the investigators.
You are right that people with too much debt, gambling problems, current drug use, etc. don't get one. But that makes sense. I've worked with some pretty sketchy characters though and they didn't have a problem getting or keeping there clearances.
I don't think I've ever personally known somebody who had theirs denied, I've known one person who had their taken from them for doing some questionable things.
It could have been the particular agency that was doing the clearance in my case. With a military customer, I saw less issues, but with the customer I was referring to in my previous post, there were lots of denials. I think the location of foreign born wives is important in this case. The few cases I saw were countries we don't have good intelligence relationships with, in asia and the middle east.
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So 1 in 150 Americans have the high levels of clearance talked about in this article?
No, classified at some level.
Right. As to specific compartments and SAPs, I wouldn't have any idea what the number is (by design).
I've worked on SAP programs that had 3 people on them. Some of the larger compartments probably have hundreds of thousands read into them.