Trusting Big Brother

The Washington Post this morning has a massive interactive spread entitled "Top Secret America" in which they "shockingly disclose" information about companies and their relationships with government entities, including the amazing number of people with Top Secret clearance in the United States.

First off, day one of this week long article revealed essentially nothing that wasn't already publicly available. If you are aware of the "awards" section of the FedBizOpps website, then you could easily have protracted this information. Further, many of the relationships between companies and their government clients are not clearly explained. Sure, Northrup-Grumman has 27 government agencies they work with. Okay so what? Sure N-G has X number of employees, but what percentage of them are even aware of the TS-level work being done at the company? And of those, how many work on TS-level projects daily? The WaPo article paints the 800,000+ people affiliated with companies affiliated with TS work as some sort of vast cloud of secret police, all working on dark projects to make you disappear in the night, if some government overlord wished it so.

The truth is, most of the work done at these companies is very mundane. Like reading reports and staring at maps. Turns out almost all government information that involves "location data" is TS-level. Even if the information is simply "gas prices in Kandahar"...because you are using location data, its probably TS-level info...or higher

Also, the WaPo throws out the glaring data point that "an estimated 854,000 people hold TS-level clearance" (No background is given to corroborate this estimate). Well, the government must just give it out like candy then. The truth is, TS clearance is hard to get. Have a brother-in-law that is a felon? You probably will have a tough time getting cleared. A lot of debt? Do you ever gamble? Ever been arrested for anything? Any investments in foreign economies or foreign property? These are all pretty hard barriers to cross for TS clearance. The investigative entities that determine your ability to hold TS clearance search diligently for patterns of behavior that you might have that could be leveraged against you to force information out of you. Have you had an affair? Are you divorced? Gonna make getting clearance tougher, if not impossible. Especially if your ex-spouse gets interviewed and lies about you. Which they might.
TS-level clearance takes time, and interviews, and background checks. The people that have it probably aren't people that the citizens of the United States should fear.


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