Monday, July 19, 2010

On Top Secret Security Clearances

Today, WaPo has a lead story on Top Secret security clearances. According to WaPo:
The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.
I have a person who recently received a Top Secret security clearance. If the background check that was done on this guy is the type of check that is standard, then there really is no reason to do background checks at all.

What was done on this guy was a standard background check that might have worked real well in the 1950's, but is a joke in today's world. Investigators went out to talk to this guy's neighbors, who knew that he got in a car in the morning to go to work and came home at night. That's all they knew about him.

What wasn't done was a check of something basic like who were the two or three people the guy was making cell phone calls to 3 or 4 times a day. The people he was making these daily phone calls to knew a lot more about this guy than any neighbors.

Bottom line: From every angle that would disqualify a person from getting a Top Secret clearance, from huge money problems, to phony prescriptions for drugs, to conducting illegal activities for a police department and way, way beyond, nothing was detected, and this guy proudly walks around today with his Top Secret clearance.

1 comment:

  1. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

    This is impossible to begin with because socialists can't calculate, but making such calculation even more inarticulate and obfuscatory works in the socialists interest because it gives them even more BS wiggle room to come up with some mysticism-based justification for why they need more power and funding.

    When empiricism is impossible, arbitrary tyranny has free reign.

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