Interim clearances put ‘secrets’ at risk

Surveillance law faces fight

WASHINGTON, Sept 12, (Agencies): A government backlog of 700,000 security clearance reviews has led agencies like the Defense Department to inadvertently issue interim passes to criminals — even rapists and killers — prompting calls for better and faster vetting of people with access to the nation’s secrets.

The pileup, which is government-wide, is causing work delays for both federal and private intelligence efforts. It takes about four months to acquire a clearance to gain access to “secret” information on a needto-know basis, and nine to 10 months for “top-secret” clearance.

Efforts to reduce the backlog coincide with pressure to tighten the reins on classified material. In recent years, intelligence agencies have suffered some of the worst leaks of classified information in US history. Still, calls for a faster clearance process are getting louder.

“If we don’t do interim clearances, nothing gets done,” Dan Payne, director of the US Defense Security Service, said last week at an intelligence conference.

Yet Payne described handing out interim clearances as risky business. On the basis of partial background checks, people are being given access to secret and top-secret information sometimes for long periods of time, he said.

“I’ve got murderers who have access to classified information,” he said. “I have rapists. I have pedophiles. I have people involved in child porn. I have all these things at the interim clearance level and I’m pulling their clearances on a weekly basis.”

“We are giving those people access to classified information with only the minimum amount of investigation. This is why we have to fix this process. This is why we have to drive these timelines down.”

Payne didn’t say how many criminals his agency has discovered, if their offenses were new or old, or if any of them had mishandled classified material. Efforts to reach him for this story were unsuccessful.

Payne

Issue

People being investigated for interim clearances are subject to background checks, too, but quick access to state and local records can be challenging, said a former Defense Department official, who was not authorized to speak about the issue and commented only on condition of anonymity.

More than 4.3 million people hold security clearances of various levels, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. They include nearly 3 million at the “confidential” or “secret” level and more than 1 million at the “top secret” level.

Checking federal employees and private contractors is a laborious process that requires an extensive background check and an effort to judge a person’s trustworthiness.

Ninety-five percent of all background investigations are conducted by the National Background Investigations Bureau, which does some of the work itself and contracts the rest to private firms.

The backlog grew significantly after the government stopped doing business with a contractor that suffered a data breach in 2014. That depleted the government’s capacity to do investigations by 60 percent, said Charles Phalen, director of the investigations bureau.

Hundreds of new investigators have been hired since, Phalen said, but the backlog is “still way high.”

He and other officials think the process needs to be updated to ensure the government can spot possible problems in real time.

Is a clearance holder dealing with money woes or personal problems, such as alcohol or drug addiction? Is there unexplained foreign travel, questionable use of computer networks, or other issues that might point to possible leaks?

The US Justice and Intelligence chiefs on Monday formally asked Congress to renew a crucial surveillance law, setting up a battle with civil libertarians over collection of Americans’ personal data.

Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and Attorney General Jeff Sessions are seeking a reauthorization of Title VII of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), whose key Section 702 allows the National Security Agency to tap the communications of foreigners located abroad for intelligence purposes.

That power has become crucial, intelligence officials say, in preventing terror attacks and other major threats.

But in that process, critics say, the NSA also scoops up the communications of Americans, violating their privacy rights and leaving the information freely available to other intelligence agencies and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Section 702 was passed in 2008 to replace a previously secret and illegal warrantless wiretap program instituted after the Sept 11, 2001 attacks.

It gave intelligence agencies the power to tap the phone calls and emails of foreigners located outside the United States carried by US communications companies.

It was renewed in 2012 for five more years, and comes up for reauthorization again by December 31.

Section 702 “produces significant foreign intelligence that is vital to protect the nation against international terrorism and other threats,” Coats and Sessions said in a letter to congressional leaders. They asked for unchanged and permanent reauthorization, arguing that the statute “provides a comprehensive regime of oversight by all three branches of Government to protect the privacy and civil liberties of US persons.”

Critics, however, say that the measure has allowed the NSA to reap communications of Americans, including communications wholly inside the country without a foreign component.

It has also been revealed that the law allowed the collection and retention of incidental personal information unrelated to the targets of investigations.

The government has also been accused of using information collected in prosecutions of Americans, such as in drug cases.

Senator Ron Wyden, the leading critic of 702 in Congress who serves on the Senate Intelligence Committee, has suggested that the amounts of incidentally collected data on Americans is sizable.

Wyden argues that 702 must be revised to tighten the authorizations and require more protection of Americans from the NSA’s spying.

“How many innocent law-abiding Americans have been swept up in this program that has been written and developed to target foreigners overseas?” he wrote in a statement early this year.

“Congress’s judgment about the impact of section 702 depends on getting this number.”