I grew up outside DC and every so often you hear of the security clearance spooks interviewing you or someone you know about some jamoke you went to high school with to determine if they're a security risk. They also ask those people really difficult questions, like, "Would you use drugs at work?" "If you did, would you download illegal documents?" "If you did get high at work and download illegal documents, would you post them on Myspace?" About half of the people actually fail to answer those questions in the expected way. The other half make 200,000 dollars a year from a subcontractor of a subcontractor of Northrop Grumman pushing paper at a desk all year.
It's a national disgrace.
It's one thing for an IT admin on a Massachusetts national guard post to get access to a few local secrets. It's another when he's downloading hundreds of documents unrelated to his duties on a war thousands of miles away.
Your average file share or web server for a medium-sized corporation with a negligible amount of confidential data probably has that level of monitoring, it's not particularly surprising that the slower-moving military doesn't yet but it probably should.
But just getting a security clearance isn't enough to have access to "all this information", right? My understanding has been that getting security clearance can make one eligible to do work which would involve some specific sensitive information, but that stuff is still meant to be compartmentalized. There's no reason people who are working on e.g. the supply chain for some radar component need to have access to intel on some other country's chemical weapons and vice versa.
This situation is sort of intentional: one of the big findings of the 9/11 commission is that intelligence information was too siloized and analysts were missing big things because they didn't have access to products of other agencies. But there's a balancing act here, and this is the downside of open access.
I'm realizing my initial impression of the landscape here is also skewed by some peripheral awareness of how government contractors may have narrow access to specific material for their work. I understand why intentionally, some actual government employees have a much broader view. But how large is that group with broad access?
Even better, a 2016 article about TS Intellipedia [2], the MediaWiki install on JWICS, says it has "255,402 registered users." That's probably pretty similar to the JWICS user count at the time.
[1] https://fedscoop.com/jwics-modernization-dia-douglas-cossa/
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/nsa-version-wikipedia-called...
I can't see how those could sensibly be in the same domain. I imagine it's about like any other huge collection of data, with large variance in how well things are categorized and restricted.
That's what happens when you don't want the government to spend money actually hiring skilled employees. Instead we waste money trying to not waste money. The government could pay a very skilled developer $150k/year + benefits. But certain people think that the government only wastes money. So we can't have public sector employees making comparable wages. Instead we pay a "contractor"[1] $200k/year where the contractor gets $110k of that and the employer takes the other $90k.
[1] They are de facto public employees
we've been losing a great deal of technical expertise recently to industry, where Fortune 500s are offering compensation packages 200% to 250% higher than the current compensation of federal contractors & technical civil servants.
No, it's s a national sport.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/04/13/...
UPD They changed the wording, the current version:
>Teixeira told members of the online group Thug Shaker Central that he worked as an technology support staffer for the Massachusetts Air National Guard and at a base on Cape Cod, and this was how he was able to access classified documents, one member of the Discord server told the Post.
Or its a Snowden situation and he has access because he has privileges on the system due to being a sys admin of some sort.
Another problem with clearances in general is that often those eligible come from less diverse backgrounds due to parental citizenship considerations. fields that require a clearance are often less diverse because of this.
People who have some time in the military probably won't be surprised if the situation is what the media is portraying it to be. As Abraham Lincoln pointed out about the US, the biggest problems for the country will come from within.