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Comment by supernova87a | Hacker News Reader

Isn't "Q" only a general top clearance and not really revealing how many people are privy to important secret information? I understood that Q indicates someone could be given access to certain information from a risk point of view, and only with some further project-specific reason would they actually have access to actual secrets.

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A Q clearance could mean you are privy to absolutely nothing. The janitors cleaning the buildings in the secure part of LANL all have Q clearances because they might, might, be exposed to classified information. Needless to say, just because they might poke their nose in the wrong office, doesn't mean they will. The less you know, the less the Lab wants to track your whereabouts after hours.

The easiest way to understand is to picture if clearances didn't exist. If you had a requirement for certain material, someone would have to decide if you were safe, perhaps do background checks, get someone to vouch for you, etc.

Clearances just standardize that, so you can trust that it's been performed within X years. You still don't share material without a requirement, you've just outsourced the other half.

Yes, a person with Q or TS would also need SCI and/or sigma clearances in order to access anything (without an escort).

No, as the article tries to make clear, it is for handling of nuclear weapons-related information only. And yeah, people get it because they need to work in a lab or otherwise be proximate to the work, but aren't working directly on it themselves.

It is definitely not for handling nuclear weapons-related information only. It's as generic as a normal TS in that agency and is even given temporarily to people coming in from outside agencies with a TS/Poly for meetings.

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