And the enemy within

The White House and Attorney General Jeff Sessions may be obsessed with leaks of classified information from within their own ranks, but the real problem of protecting the nation’s secrets is far more basic than that.

Some 700,000 reviews for government security clearances are pending at the moment and that has led some agencies — such the Defense Department — to issue interim security clearances. And down that road lies the potential for real disaster.

Dan Payne, director of the U.S. Defense Security System, told an intelligence conference about the risks of opting for interim clearances as an end run around the backlog.

“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.”

More than 4.3 million people hold security clearances, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. About 1 million of those are at the “top secret” level. It currently takes nine to 10 months to get one of those and about four months to acquire a lowerlevel “secret” clearance — of which there are about 3 million.

Part of the backlog problem dates back to 2014 when a private contractor was booted after a major security breach.

The system for processing such clearances is itself something of an artifact that has changed little since it was developed in the late 1940s — long before social media and the internet, which have pretty much made everyone’s life an open book.

But somewhere in the backlog of interim clearances could be the next Edward Snowden. Do we really want to wait for that?