Your Guide to Security Clearances
1. What are they?
So, you have an amazing opportunity to get your proverbial foot in the door of the national security world as either a civilian employee or contractor. Congratulations! There is just one obstacle that seems daunting – you need a security clearance.
· A “security clearance” is a determination by an Agency of the United States government that an individual may access some level of classified information.
Perhaps you are already familiar with the process through friends or family. Or, if like me when I first went through the process, you might have no idea what is in store and your information mainly came via a reddit sub-thread.
The Basics
There are many articles and opinion pieces currently circulating about the classification of records and information in the United States. Our government uses a fairly complicated and broad classification system to protect information coupled with a (hopefully) thorough system of investigations and clearances to authorize individuals to access that information.
There are many tiers to the classification system – and documents and systems are ‘marked’ according to their respective level of classification. For example, some material might be designated ‘confidential,’ while other material might be designated “secret” or “top secret.” The classification level of material you will need to access as part of your exciting new job will determine the level of security clearance you will need before you are hired. The length and difficulty of the clearance process corresponds, as you could imagine, to the level of clearance you need.[1]
Security Clearances are granted at one of three basic levels:
· Confidential (C)
“Confidential” information is information that may cause damage to national security if disclosed. A clearance that provides access to confidential information requires a National Agency Check with Local Agency Check and Credit Check (NACLC) and must be reinvestigated every 15 years.
· Secret (S)
A disclosure of “secret” information may cause serious damage to national security. A secret clearance requires an applicant to undergo the same NACLC as a confidential clearance, but also requires a full credit investigation. Secret clearances must be re-investigated every 10 years.
· Top Secret (TS)
Disclosure of top secret information may cause grave damage to national security. Top Secret clearances are reinvestigated (at a minimum) every 5 years and require a Single Scope Background Investigation (SSBI). While clearances at the confidential and secret level can take a long time, the process is relatively simple. A SSBI, on the other hand, depending on the agency granting the clearance, will be involved (with how involved depending on the Agency being asked to grant the clearance). The investigation involves applicants completing the dreaded Standard Form 86 (SF86) with questions seeking detailed employment, residence, education, and affiliation histories. Your friends and neighbors and former employers will likely be contacted and interviewed. If you were divorced in the 10 years before your application, your former spouse/spouses will be interviewed. Your finances, travel history, and legal history will be scrutinized. If there is reason for the investigator to believe additional information is needed, your doctors, therapists, relatives, and cohabitants may be interviewed as well.
If you are applying for a security clearance at certain agencies, you will be required to complete a polygraph (lie detector). It is not an enjoyable process - but more about that in future installments.
Having a security clearance, though, doesn’t simply give you carte blanche to access any information classified at your level. To access classified information (theoretically), two criteria must be met 1) you must have a ‘need to know’ the information. Whether or not you have a ‘need to know’ is determined by an officer in the office where the material in question originated (for example, if the State Department has classified certain material, that office will determine who ‘needs to know’ the material, not another agency that simply also has its own classified information).
Beyond the basic clearance levels are two categories for information at the top secret level that require special levels of clearance.
· Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI)
Depending on the work you will be doing for the government or for the government by way of a government contractor, your clearance might need to be TS/SCI. In addition to completing all the steps for a TS clearance, an applicant must go through a special adjudication process for evaluating the investigation. If that adjudication is favorable, the clearance holder will have access to sensitive information – but that access to sensitive information is assigned only in ‘compartments.’
There are a few different ways that the government tries to protect classified information. First is the basic requirement for a security clearance, next is limiting disclosure of the information to those who have a need to know, finally, where disclosure of information could cause serious damage, people with a need to know are only granted access to the figurative ‘walled-in’ section holding that particular information.
Compartments are separated from each other by organization so that an individual with access to one compartment will not necessarily have access to another. Additionally, as opposed to clearances which are good for a certain period of time (if used) and are renewed through re-investigations, individuals may be granted access to a compartment for any period of time. Compartments may have their own special requirements and clearance process.
· Special Access Programs (SAP)
In the Department of Defense, where specific information is considered exceptionally important, the DOD might determine that the normal rules for determining eligibility for access are not sufficient to protect the information. In that case, the Department might designate a Special Access Program which employs enhanced security measures to strictly enforce need-to-know. These security clearances and information access ‘stack,’ so someone with a Top-Secret clearance might be referred to as TS/SCI and also have access to one or more SAP.
In the second installment of this rather short series of posts, I will write a bit more about the process for obtaining a clearance and what to expect. If you are beginning the process, though, as a heads up, here are some things to think about:
1) Gather the information you will need for the various applications. Create a folder on your computer and drop information and supporting documents in as you find it/them. Sources of information might be old CVs and resumes, apartment leases or address forms (dates of residences and addresses, the identity of people who have known you when you lived or worked in various places, any court records related to past run-ins with the law …).
2) Consider calling an attorney (shameless plug here – ben.barlow@smitheylaw.com). This could be a good idea if you have run into a tricky situation at any clearance level, but when dealing with the SF86 for a Top Secret clearance, you might run into the situation where you do not know what information to provide – or you might not know how best to describe what happened in that decades-old legal encounter. Though I often encounter clearance issues when someone if facing a loss of a clearance, it is not uncommon to receive calls for a consultation early int eh process. The cost of a legal consultation (usually around $400) seems high, but is a very small investment when the value of the security clearance is taken into consideration.
[1] https://sgp.fas.org/spb/bginvest.html