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For those in this thread that are confused what the tech companies could be looking for with these cleared people, let me give you an example. I used to work fo

For those in this thread that are confused what the tech companies could be looking for with these cleared people, let me give you an example. I used to work for a company that ran DNS services for public utilities i.e. "critical infrastructure". Every week we would get a classified list of "bad" domains (usually domains that malware would phone home to) from a 3 letter agency and we would notify the utilities if we saw any DNS requests for those domains from any of their computers. Only cleared personnel were allowed to see the list or touch any of the computers that saw the list in any way. A tech company that wanted to work with a 3 letter agency to see such a list in order to protect their own infrastructure would need cleared personnel and a SCIF (the windowless air-gapped rooms that cleared people work from) to even talk to the agency about a list.

docandrew 9y ago
I think the article created a lot of the confusion. Having access to cleared people is important to companies primarily for winning lucrative government contracts. For example, if a 3 letter agency wants to implement a cloud service on an air-gapped intranet, or award a contract to implement social-media algorithms to suss out terrorist networks, they'll look to companies with that sort of expertise. But if those companies don't have a corps of cleared employees, they're out of the running. Having said that, having trustworthy employees (which a clearance implies, but does not guarantee) might be valuable to companies not dealing with classified information, but the article left out the real reason that companies are heavily invested in recruiting people with clearances.