Background investigations

FINANCIAL COST OF CORONAVIRUS LEADS TOP COUNTERINTELLIGENCE OFFICIAL TO RELAX TOP-SECRET CLEARANCE RULES

The government's top counterintelligence official is telling security officers across the Executive Branch to relax rules for vetting workers with Top Secret clearances, citing financial hardships that may hit as a result of the coronavirus. William R. Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, said Monday that workers with financial problems needed to be reconsidered in a new context, not as security risks or disqualified to hold a clearance.

The new directive is needed because a little known program called "continuous evaluation" now constantly scrutinizes the activities of some 1.7 million security clearance holders—military servicemembers, civil service employees and even private industry workers—matching crime reports, court records, property transactions, and credit scores to workers and flagging activities that indicate possible wrongdoing or deception. This Big Brother automated system is used to verify and uncover facts about individuals as well as look for anomalous activity that might reveal spying for a foreign government but also provides early warning of "insider threats": the next Edward Snowden-type individual who uses their access to government secrets to make public revelations.

The program, instituted government-wide in 2018, is described by its operators as a good government measure and a money-saving blessing, an improvement over old shoe-leather methods of doing background investigations. Part of the what the federal government is calling Trusted Workforce 2.0, continuous evaluation is said to be less intrusive, cheaper and more accurate.

Background investigations

Trump transfers background investigation power to Pentagon

The Department of Defense will have full responsibility for conducting background investigations of federal employees and contractors, under an executive order signed by President Donald Trump April 24.

The Trump administration has long telegraphed the transfer, as background investigations for DoD personnel were already assigned to the Pentagon under the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2018, and officials maintained that transferring the whole process to one agency would be more efficient.

“Implementing that legislative mandate while retaining the benefit of economies of scale in addressing the federal government's background investigations workload, avoiding unnecessary risk, promoting the ongoing alignment of efforts with respect to vetting federal employees and contractors, and facilitating needed reforms in this critical area requires that the primary responsibility for conducting background investigations government-wide be transferred from the Office of Personnel Management to the Department of Defense,” Trump wrote in the executive order.

The order also mandates that the Defense Security Service, which began the process of taking over security clearance IT systems from the Defense Information Systems Agency in March, change its name to the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency.