Charles Sowell, former Deputy Assistant Director for Special Security at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, is a senior vice president at Salient Federal Solutions in Fairfax, Virginia.
Recent tragedies have highlighted numerous flaws in our current security clearance vetting process, but the future holds great promise for real transformation. Key drivers for change are in place: committed senior leadership, cost realities, technology advancements, and data availability.
Edward Snowden successfully completed a periodic reinvestigation in 2011 but still left the United States with four laptops and tens of thousands of documents up to the Top Secret Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) level. In 2010, Private Manning stole hundreds of thousands of Secret documents and provided them to the WikiLeaks organization. In September, Aaron Alexis murdered twelve innocent victims at the Washington Navy Yard.
Many experts—and some members of Congress—are already asking whether the security clearance process should have prevented Snowden, Manning or Alexis from committing their heinous acts. Our current process is best at providing a snapshot in time, not handling real-time changes which could have raised critical flags in these cases. Fortunately, key government leaders have been working to create a “continuous evaluation” model that offers dramatic improvements to the existing system. Continuous evaluation would allow government to be as nimble as other sectors like the credit industry by incorporating new data into the process as quickly as possible; not just once every five or ten years, or as is self-reported by individual clearance holders. For continuous evaluation to be successful, our leaders must invest in putting adjudicatively-relevant government information in a common readable and exchangeable format to help implement this “near real time” reporting.
Following the Washington Navy Yard shootings, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus ordered reviews of military installation and personnel security to “do everything possible to prevent this from happening again.” The country is in position to do just that, provided our government leadership is empowered and supported to make the changes they know should be made.
Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper has the authority as Security Executive Agent for all government personnel security matters. His exceptional leadership and experience, and commitment to transformation offer our best chance for real change. As he stated earlier this month at the Intelligence and National Security Alliance Summit, if continuous evaluation and insider threat detection capabilities planned in the Intelligence Community Information Technology Enterprise (ICITE) were in place, the government “might have detected Snowden a lot earlier than we did.” Director Clapper is the driving force behind ICITE and security clearance transformation.
Merton Miller, Associate Director for Federal Investigative Services at the Office of Personnel Management, is a committed and courageous leader making breakthroughs throughout the investigative process. Mr. Miller consistently advocates for necessary changes in our clearance process, including a move to continuous evaluation and critical actions needed to improve record and data exchanges across the federal government. If data exists, but can’t be shared or isn’t readily available, the clearance process suffers.
Other senior government officials are critical changes agents. The Defense Security Service and Information Systems Security Office have visionary leaders who consistently demonstrate their commitment to improving the clearance process and the National Industrial Security Program. The Office of Management and Budget has a key role in coordinating improvements across government and measuring progress. Congressional leaders have demonstrated their critical oversight role in recent hearings on the clearance process. The Government Accountability Office continues to issue important reports on progress and needed changes. Security directors throughout government are continuing to improve the current system as well as help design the new one.
Our security clearance process has undergone numerous changes and reforms since its inception. The 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act led to remarkable improvements in background investigation timeliness. It also mandated improvements in quality and reciprocity, and although progress has been made in both these areas, GAO reports continue to highlight the need for further improvements. Most experts agree that while the clearance process has improved, it has not been truly transformed.
IRTPA did not address the cost of our security clearance process. The government spends billions of dollars each year on background investigations, adjudications, security clearance databases, and routine personnel security transactions including visit certifications, security training, and indoctrinations. In light of recent events, Congress is right to ask if we are getting our money’s worth.
The strong leadership and commitment from ODNI, OPM, DoD, OMB, GAO and Congress is essential to transforming an expensive, ineffective clearance process to an agile, affordable system that leverages technology advancements and new, relevant data sources. Continuous evaluation is the future, and as recent events demonstrate, we need to implement it now. The American public is fortunate to have in place an exceptional combination of government leaders who understand the problem, the processes and the technologies that can get us there. They should be fully empowered to act.
