There are roughly five million plus people with active security clearances currently in the U.S., granted by a variety of different U.S. agencies. Of these about 1.5 million have top secret clearances – which seem an excessive number when you compare it with say the number off all employees currently working for all the intelligence agencies in the U.S.
Making matters worse you have hundreds of thousands of private contractors as well with clearances…
Simply put that number is way too high!
This is fine, l suppose if your a police state, but terrible if your a democracy that values human rights and operates under a bill of rights.
Oddly enough, according to a friend at Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), few people if ever have their clearances ever revoked for cause? For example the CIA had less than 0.4% of its security clearances revoked, in the Federal Bureau of Investigation that percentage was 0.1%.
Part of the problem is the top secret clearances are only reviewed once every 5 years. In the case of secret only once every ten years, needless to say a lot can happen in between that time. I know of incidents, especially in the CIA and FBI, for example, where people have gotten DUI/DWI (Drunk While Driving/Drunk Under the Influence) charges and convictions, or domestic violence charges filed against them and yet somehow maintain those security clearances – which is not a good idea.
In those cases where personnel lost clearance it was due primarily to three areas. 1) retirement, 2) job change, 3) or leaving government service.
The other problem is that those with clearances often have access to way too much information that doesn’t meet rational criteria for a “need to know.” Such was the case with Pvt. Bradley Manning, who downloaded hundreds of thousands of classified files, including secret State Department diplomatic cables.
In that instance the information should have been “compartmentalized” so those without a need to know didn’t have access to it. Instead it resulted in the largest data breach in US history ( aka: the Wikileaks disclosure).