Every day across the United States, 854,000 [nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C.] civil servants, military personnel and private contractors with top-secret security clearances are scanned into offices protected by electromagnetic locks, retinal cameras and fortified walls that eavesdropping equipment cannot penetrate.

A standard definition of Top Secret: “Top Secret” shall be applied to information, the unauthorized disclosure of which reasonably could be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security.

Sounds like a pretty exclusive club, or should be right? If you were to take all of the government employees who might be within a football’s field distance from a piece of “Top Secret” paper…including everyone who works at the Pentagon, CIA, NSA, all active duty military officers, etc. from lowest ranking clerk to top chief, that’d equal to about that 800K number, right (*see footnote)?

Here’s some numbers, taken from Wikipedia and other similarly take-with-a-grain-of-salt sources (some agencies have their payrolls classified):

So, if Excel is correct, subtracting the usual suspects and then some, there are still more than 260,000 people out there with access to secrets that could cause “grave damage” to our country. But I guess if we’ve got solid security standards applied across all the bureaucracies, it’s not like some barely-old-enough-to-legally-drink-maybe-emotionally-insecure-kid, who happened to be given top secret clearance, could waltz into a classified network system by pretending to listen to Lady Gaga and download anything critical, right?

* Footnote: My count doesn’t include private contractors, some of which do legitimately need top secret clearance. But I believe that’s the point of the WaPo piece, that our intelligence infrastructure has become so bloated and convulutedthat even if you were to wildly overestimate the number of government employees who need top secret clearance, you’d still have hundreds of thousands of other people, including contractors, if the WaPo estimate is on the mark. Read their Top Secret America series for even more disturbing implications.

The post There are 854,000 people with “Top Secret” Clearance. Who the hell are they? (WaPo’s Top Secret America series) appeared first on danwin.com.

Wired has posted some of the relevant chat logs between ex-hacker Adrian Lamo and Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old suspect in the Wikileaks-leak case. Reading it makes you a little ill at what passes for top-secret security in the institution that defends our country:

(01:54:42 PM) Manning: i would come in with music on a CD-RW
(01:55:21 PM) Manning: labelled with something like “Lady Gaga”… erase the music… then write a compressed split file
(01:55:46 PM) Manning: no-one suspected a thing
(01:55:48 PM) Manning: =L kind of sad
(01:56:04 PM) Lamo: and odds are, they never will
(01:56:07 PM) Manning: i didnt even have to hide anything
(01:56:36 PM) Lamo: from a professional perspective, i’m curious how the server they were on was insecure
(01:57:19 PM) Manning: you had people working 14 hours a day… every single day… no weekends… no recreation…
(01:57:27 PM) Manning: people stopped caring after 3 weeks
(01:57:44 PM) Lamo: i mean, technically speaking
(01:57:51 PM) Lamo: or was it physical
(01:57:52 PM) Manning: >nod< (01:58:16 PM) Manning: there was no physical security
(01:58:18 PM) Lamo: it was physical access, wasn’t it
(01:58:20 PM) Lamo: hah
(01:58:33 PM) Manning: it was there, but not really
(01:58:51 PM) Manning: 5 digit cipher lock… but you could knock and the door…
(01:58:55 PM) Manning: *on
(01:59:15 PM) Manning: weapons, but everyone has weapons
(02:00:12 PM) Manning: everyone just sat at their workstations… watching music videos / car chases / buildings exploding… and writing more stuff to CD/DVD… the culture fed opportunities

So this is the security blocking secrets so sensitive to our national security and diplomacy? It’s not hard to sympathize with the militia-types who don’t want to even hand over their last names to a welfare agency. What do the low-level domestic grunts watch while “securing” that data, the Lifetime Channel?

Also, an excerpt in which Manning describes what made him turn against his country (hint: something to do with detainee treatment; kind of amazing how that is becoming an endless source of misery for both detainee and detainers):

(02:31:02 PM) Manning: i think the thing that got me the most… that made me rethink the world more than anything
(02:35:46 PM) Manning: was watching 15 detainees taken by the Iraqi Federal Police… for printing “anti-Iraqi literature”… the iraqi federal police wouldn’t cooperate with US forces, so i was instructed to investigate the matter, find out who the “bad guys” were, and how significant this was for the FPs… it turned out, they had printed a scholarly critique against PM Maliki… i had an interpreter read it for me… and when i found out that it was a benign political critique titled “Where did the money go?” and following the corruption trail within the PM’s cabinet… i immediately took that information and *ran* to the officer to explain what was going on… he didn’t want to hear any of it… he told me to shut up and explain how we could assist the FPs in finding *MORE* detainees…
(02:36:27 PM) Manning: everything started slipping after that… i saw things differently

Also, Manning divulges details about his preferential treatment by Assange, which would explain Assange’s reported efforts to mount a legal defense of Manning…or at least advise him not to spill anymore of the Wikileaks operational secrets.

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