Security clearance

Security clearance reforms: our nation depends on it

Barely one year ago, the world of security clearances was in crisis. The backlog of investigations for individuals seeking a clearance was well over 700,000 — an all-time high. This backlog created a shortage of cleared workers, with critical government functions delayed or deferred.

Recent actions have dramatically reduced the investigations backlog, now below 350,000 and approaching a steady-state number. However, increases in the number of completed investigations created a new backlog in the next step of the process, which is the adjudication decision of whether to grant a clearance to individual government workers, military personnel, or contractors. Despite this new backlog and the continued long wait times, the security clearance process has made progress.

Big changes are underway. On Oct. 1, the Department of Defense takes over the background investigation mission for the entire federal government, adding it to a new Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, or DCSA. DoD is implementing a Continuous Evaluation program. CE is designed to catch problems as they emerge, rather than when a cleared individual is periodically reviewed. In addition, a major executive branch initiative is underway, entitled “Trusted Workforce 2.0.” Together, these improvements will help counter increasing threats from both external and internal sources.

The federal contracting industry has a huge stake in the success of these initiatives. Private sector firms who work on government contracts are committed to the missions of their customers.

Security clearance

Progress Is Finally Being Made on Security Clearance Backlog

The security clearance backlog has been reduced by 32%, and is now down to just under 500,000 cases, according to National Background Investigations Bureau Director Charles Phalen, speaking before an audience of security professionals at the National Security Institute’s IMPACT seminar.

Over the past year, officials at the Office of Personnel Management, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and across the executive branch have been hard at work agreeing to a framework for Trusted Workforce 2.0, the government’s effort to overhaul the security clearance process from the ground up. The first phase in that process has largely focused on reducing the size of the security clearance backlog. With that progress well underway, officials agree it’s now time to begin the kind of overhauls that will also help improve security clearance processing times.

Processing Times

Security clearance processing figures released in the first quarter of 2019 painted a bleak picture—468 days for Top Secret and 234 days for Secret security clearances for Defense Department and industry applicants—and those were the fastest 90% of cases. Security clearance processing times for Defense and industry applicants are at a slight improvement from the highs seen in the second quarter of 2018, when a Top Secret security clearance took a whopping 543 days to process, and a Secret clearance took an average of 325 days to process. But processing times remain higher than they were in the last quarter of 2018.

Security clearance

Security clearances should not be a partisan issue

A whistleblower who had worked for both Republican and Democratic administrations, spending a total of 18 years in the White House, told Congress that the White House had overridden professional concerns about granting 25 different individuals clearances. The immediate response from the Trump White House was “WITCH HUNT.”

This is wildly inappropriate. When Republicans controlled the House, both Reps. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C. and Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, in their role as chairmen of the House Oversight Committee, initiated investigations into security clearances. And President Trump’s former hand-picked chief of staff, John Kelly, and White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II, found the process of granting clearances so disturbing that they both made a point of documenting their objections.

Never mind that some of Trump’s associates have been indicted for shady and illegal dealings with foreign governments and that this topic should be especially sensitive.

Security clearance

US to halve backlog for security clearances by spring, top official says

The federal government expects to slash a 600,000-case backlog of people waiting for security clearances in half by springtime, the No. 2 official in the U.S. intelligence community said Tuesday.

The backlog is caused in part because the nation’s 17 intelligence agencies have not had common standards, but new uniform standards will reduce the investigations required when employees move agencies or advance in their careers, said Susan M. Gordon, principal deputy at the nation’s Directorate of National Intelligence.

Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, applauded Gordon’s goal, noting that the clearance backlog was itself a threat to national security by hindering recruitment to fill intelligence jobs.

He cited both distrust between agencies and delays in completing clearances, adding that applicants to the CIA can wait a year and a half to be cleared and vetted before starting employment.

Security clearance

Spy agency speeds up vetting in race for recruits

The UK’s eavesdropping agency GCHQ is rapidly increasing the number of officers responsible for vetting new recruits after it failed to hit personnel targets last year in the face of intense competition for talent from banks and tech companies. Intelligence chiefs have warned that promising young spies and code crackers are being put off by the drawn-out process of obtaining security clearance and the lure of big money jobs with established tech companies such as Google and Facebook and big city firms. GCHQ’s “developed vetting” process is the highest level of security clearance in the UK and includes a rigorous assessment of whether anything in a candidate’s background risks placing them in “a compromising position due to conscience or undue influence”.

Security clearance

Need a New Security Clearance? Here Are 5 Things You Should Know


If you work for the government, you need to understand the security clearance process. Even if your current position doesn’t require a security clearance (and it’s hard to find one that doesn’t require at least a public trust), there’s a good chance you’ll come across clearance terminology in your workplace. Here are five things to keep in mind:

You’re not imagining it—the cleared population is shrinking. If your position used to require a clearance and now suddenly doesn’t, this point applies to you. The government’s response to insider threats was a serious crack down on access to classified information. Between 2013 and 2016 the Department of Defense reduced the number of security clearance holders by 20 percent.

Security clearance

Intelligence chief pushing for spy agency Wi-Fi, clearance overhaul

Until very recently, people entering most intelligence community facilities — top leadership included — couldn’t even get in the building wearing a FitBit or other Bluetooth-enabled fitness tracker. The idea of setting up building-wide wireless access borders on blasphemy for the old guard, the nation’s intelligence chief acknowledges, but times are changing.

“We’re attempting to establish an [intelligence community]-wide policy for wireless, which is somewhat controversial,” Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said May 17 at the GEOINT Symposium in Orlando, Florida. “But you have to allow for technology to change, because inevitably, it will.”

Security clearance

SPECIAL - Anticipating Tomorrow’s Insider Threat

The answer lies in a process called Adaptive Case Management (ACM). ACM relies on high performance analytics to manage a caseload by prioritizing risk. By evolving an intermittent reauthorization process into one smooth, risk-based continuous evaluation capability, the government can more effectively evaluate people, access controls and systems and better guard against insider threats.

These modernized case management capabilities fill in the government’s current knowledge gaps with risk factors such as abnormal financial transactions, frequent visits to foreign countries or drastic lifestyle changes. In addition to solving the problems presented by intermittent review processes, this also would enable a system to prioritize reauthorizations based on an informed understanding of potential risk. Instead of dealing with cases in the order they arrived, analytics point the agency towards the cases that present the most risk.

Security clearance

‘NOT CLEARED’ – HILLARY’S IT CONTRACTOR DID NOT HAVE PROPER SECURITY CLEARANCE

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton entrusted her email server to an IT firm that was not cleared to handle classified materials, according to the chief spokesman for the Defense Security Service.The DSS is an arm of the Defense Department and is the only federal agency authorized to approve private sector company access to sensitive or confidential material.

Security clearance

Whistleblower exposes ‘dozens’ of Secret Service agents working at White House without clearance

Dozens of security agents have been reportedly working in the White House without the appropriate clearance after the Secret Service had to rapidly hire more staff following a string of embarrassing breaches.