I’m fascinated with numbers that help explain an issue. This manifests itself especially with sports and in particular with baseball, which can be well-described with numbers. If you know that a pitcher lasted 8 innings and had 11 strikeouts, absent any other information, you can be pretty certain that his team had a good chance to win. But it applies to many more important issues as well.
I read Harper’s Magazine every month. Among the best features of the magazine is Harper’s Index. It is a compendium of unrelated facts and questions that can be summarized with a number. The magazine always publishes the sources of the information, though I must confess that I rarely check them. I, perhaps mistakenly, assume that the magazine employs fact checkers who are both more numerous and better at checking facts than I am.
I plan to regularly refer to items from Harper’s Index augmented with commentary. The items tend to be interesting and informative, and they provide an easy template for me to put together a post.
According to the June 2013 Harper’s Index, 1,400,000 Americans have top-secret security clearance. That’s a lot of Americans. Based on a US Census estimate that there were 321,418,820 people living in the US on July 1, 2015, and that approximately 248,000,000 were over 18 years old, I calculated that roughly 11 out of every 2,000 adults have top-secret clearance. If top-secret clearances were evenly distributed (and they aren’t, obviously the concentration around D.C. is much higher than average), my home town would have 15 people with top-secret clearance and the suburb where I reside would have 82 people with top-secret clearance.
The numbers provide context, they increase understanding, they are fundamental to appreciating the scope of the issue. But not all issues are amenable to numerical precision.
Security clearances come in three levels. http://govcentral.monster.com/security-clearance-jobs/articles/2330-3-levels-of-security-clearance
Confidential clearances apply to “information that reasonably could be expected to cause damage to the national security if disclosed to unauthorized sources.” “Damage” covers almost anything considered harmful or potentially harmful. That’s virtually everything, though in this situation it must damage “national security,” which is pretty amorphous. A misplaced email address, if it’s to or from an important enough person, might be expected to cause damage to national security. Or perhaps a random quote about the ongoing relevance of NATO.
Secret clearances apply to “information that reasonably could be expected to cause serious damage to the national security if disclosed to unauthorized sources.” A single word, “serious,” has been added to the definition, but it is woefully imprecise. “Serious damage” clearly rules out de minimus damage. A single misplaced email, email address, or comment would be unlikely to rise to the level of causing serious damage. But might several, several hundred, or several thousand? It likely depends on the context.
The Washington Post reports that 3.6 million people have confidential or secret clearances, that’s roughly 1% of the country. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/03/24/5. This begs the question of whether we have enough or too many people with security clearances. I will leave that for another day and another person with more inside knowledge.
Top secret clearances apply to “information that reasonably could be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security if disclosed to unauthorized sources.” Again, only one term is different. We have moved from mere “damage” to “serious damage” to “exceptionally grave damage” with precious little to guide our understanding. “Exceptionally grave” sounds pretty darn bad, but what does it mean in reality. I think we are talking about extremely important information, not a few stray emails or comments, rather something along the lines of a Snowden level disclosure.
I don’t have a security clearance of any level. I also don’t have access to information that could cause damage to the national security and I doubt that you do either. But a lot of Americans do and more are likely to every year. In this day and age, I hope they take their clearance level seriously and guard their information zealously. How important is safeguarding our government’s most important information from unauthorized sources? On a scale of 1-10, I would rate it a 10 – or higher.