Did you read the WP article last week on US Intelligence? Wonder what your thoughts were?I was amazed to read that about 900,000 hold TS clearance...makes it almost worthless, on some level..only way to “protect” info then is to compartmentalize it to such an extent that it then almost never ends up getting to the people who need it..
Compartmentalization/SAP for its own sake is generally not an idea that I favor. Comparmentalization/SAP is often done for the wrong reasons: hide the funding/purpose from Congress (arguably both good and bad depending on who’s in charge), hiding efforts/plans from the enemy (good thing), because of fear that colateral protection methods are not secure enough (i.e., under control of DSS and NISPOM), or rightly because the damage of the material if exposed could cause.
To my mind, each and EVERY person with a TS/SCI clearance should have to undergo lie detector tests yearly and further that the questions also cover patriotism and political affiliations.
if you have TS clearance, that means that someone with higher clearace/authority is allowed to share with you TS info that is neccesary for the performance of your job.
it does not mean you can go the TS-google an start surfing the secrets library.
There are buildings where the maintenance staff has TS clearance. Carpenters, electricians etc renovating a US embassy all must have Secret clearance (or TS depending on the project)
A 22 year old Army soldier about to be discharged:
“The networks, he said, were both “air gapped” from unclassified networks, but the environment at the base made it easy to smuggle data out.
“I would come in with music on a CD-RW labeled with something like ‘Lady Gaga,’ erase the music then write a compressed split file,” he wrote. “No one suspected a thing and, odds are, they never will.”
“[I] listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone’ while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history,” he added later. ”Weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security, weak counter-intelligence, inattentive signal analysis … a perfect storm.”
Read More http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/leak/