Martha Louise Deutscher - Screening the System: Exposing Security Clearance Dangers

This book critically examines the personnel security clearance system, the process by which the federal government incorporates individuals into secret national security work, and how individuals experience the process. I pay particular attention to the ways in which security clearance practices discipline and transform individuals who are subject to them. Using the voices of the systems participants, I explore the relationship between individual workers and state power as articulated in the personnel security clearance process.

I believe the public debate on security policy in generaland on the personnel security clearance system in particularrequires a new and more imaginative discussion if it is to improve. Discussions to date have been dominated by bureaucrats, security professionals, and politicians, who tend to treat the problems in the system with the same archaic policies and practices they have used in the pastwith the same flawed results.

To the best of my knowledge, this is the only study to date that examines the impact of the national personnel security clearance system on the hearts and minds of both those who are subject to it and those who are tasked to maintain it. Although the book is based on my doctoral dissertation at George Mason University, I undertook this study for personal reasons. All science is part biography. I began my civil service career in 1990 with the United States Information Agency and held positions of increasing responsibility in the Departments of State and Defense continuously until I retired from federal service in 2013.

During that time, I held and maintained security clearances at various levels and was subject to the system I describe. I have been investigated and interviewed (although never polygraphed), and I participated in the investigation of others during federal service. I never lost a clearance or had one revoked.

My federal career focused on many aspects of security policy. While at the State Department, I conducted international public diplomacy programs for the Voice of America and for the U.S. Agency for International Development.

At the Defense Department, one of my positions was legislative and public affairs director for the Department of Defense Security Service, the entity responsible for administering the National Industrial Security Program. That program administers the security clearance processes for the U.S. defense industry and the contractors employed within it. As the chief communications officer for the agency, my contact information was online, and I was easy to find. Many people called me with complaints about having lost a security clearance and consequently their jobs. I listened to their stories. I heard anger, fear, anxiety, and a full mix of human sentiment. Such emotion suggested to me at the time that the hurt resulting from losing ones security clearance was more than financial. The more I listened, the more I learned that one loses more than a career when one loses a clearance. I began to realize that I wanted to learn more about what had befallen these workers. So I undertook to study the clearance system by talking with those who had run afoul of it.

I begin with a brief history of perceived national security threats in the United States and the policies that were put in place to address them. These threats have at times included specific subsets of Americans, including government employees. I also review some of the many types of human threats that the clearance system is designed to reduce.

I then turn to the processes by which individuals are inducted into national security jobs. To describe the system, I use documentary sources from federal government websites, including those of the United States Departments of Defense, State, Treasury, Agriculture, and Homeland Security. I also reference legislation, executive orders, policy guidance and government security handbooks, and other such materials. Next I review the mechanisms used to process individuals through the clearance system. I also draw on some examples, from contemporary news reporting, of how the system sometimes fails those within it. I employ news reports as secondary sources; approached with judicious caution, they provide context to some of the debate surrounding the personnel security clearance process. And I have tried to choose the most reliable reporting.

We currently lack a scientifically rigorous and consistent way of judging people. Much of the clearance process has proven to be flawed. For this reason, trustworthy employees are sometimes wrongly removed from federal positions while spies and other potential threats remain in their jobs undetected.