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How many people have Q Clearance?
- xyzzy21 5y agoI had one. Primarily because I spent about 33% of my time at SNL (Sandia National Laboratories, not Saturday Night Live). I was working with rad-hardened semiconductors in the context of weapons effects as well as natural space radiation.
- QuarterReptile 5y agoFrom reading a DOE website, it looks like the sigma clearance is the one that relates to weapons, whereas Q maybe is less specific and can include energy production.
- klyrs 5y agoSounds like Q is pretty broad. It can also include cryptography.
- starwind 5y agocryptography would fall under TS/SCI through an intelligence agency or the DoD. Q is actually pretty narrow
- klyrs 5y agoI knew some number theorists at the NSA who claimed have Q clearance (long before QAnon was a thing). As far as I know, they know nothing about nukes. Have I been punked, or is the NSA a branch of the DoD?
- starwind 5y agoThis is pure speculation: if someone worked on some kind of communication involving nuclear missiles, they might work for the NSA and have Q. But otherwise I can’t think of a reason they would. That said, NSA is a world almost wholly unknown to me
- klyrs 5y agoWhat I know: clearance is compartmentalized. The NSA's mandate is both to break foreign crypto, and protect sensitive communication. That includes, possibly, the means to break domestic communication about, well, anything, including nukes. The laws and policies regarding this are, themselves, secret. There's even a secret court. The existence of these secret courts and secret laws has recently been affirmed as legitimate by the supreme court. So, no shit you're speculating, and I very well may have been lied to by the person attempting to recruit me to the NSA. I didn't want to live in secrecy; soon thereafter, Thomas Drake's reports confirmed my suspicion that the NSA wasn't as white-hat as I'd been told.
- QuarterReptile 5y agoI don't fully follow your comment or necessarily know what you mean by a "branch", but the NSA is explicitly part of the DOD.
- nabla9 5y agoQ is clearance for persons, sigma is classification of data.
- eddof13 5y agoYou need Q for certain facilities as well, SWIM had one and it was just to work in the building, and there wasn't anything going on there of particular interest
- jdavis703 5y agoJust because you had no legitimate access to anything interesting doesn’t mean there was nothing interesting you could have accidentally or nefariously accessed. I had a clearance doing tech support, but never even saw actual classified materials. But because as IT support we also had to support SCIF facilities, high-ranking officials with potentially sloppy OpSec, etc we obviously still needed clearances.
- noir_lord 5y agoWhich makes sense, all the security policies in the world enforced by IT fall apart when you assume the rogue (or even just accidental) actor is IT.
- aimor 5y ago"so I filed a Freedom of Information Act request" Exactly the thing I was thinking after reading just the title. Glad to see he got a response and published it here! Site is down now, but: April 2018 – 87,113 April 2019 – 90,454 April 2020 – 98,103 April 2021 – 92,177
- ashtonkem 5y agoSo, a lot of people. This backs up another poster’s assertion that Q clearance is required for certain jobs, even if you don’t handle any information that requires it. ~100,000 people with some secrets is probably too many people to actually keep said secrets secret.
- aerostable_slug 5y agoNote that Sigmas further control various types of information. The number of people with something like Sigma 20 (very sensitive data regarding certain improvised nuclear explosives) is a small subset of those with a Q clearance. And of course, our friend Need To Know is always in play.
- xxpor 5y agoI'm kind of shocked that the numbers aren't themselves classified.
- TheCoelacanth 5y agoI would imagine that how many people have actual access to nuclear information is more closely guarded. Most of these people wouldn't have any actual access, they just have the clearance that would allow them to have access if they are in a role that requires access.
- entropie 5y agoIts dead jim
- uncomputation 5y agoSlashdotted.
- madars 5y agoSite is down but someone archived it: https://archive.md/mYnjF https://archive.md/mYnjF
- dredmorbius 5y agoInternet Archive also: https://web.archive.org/web/20211112214234/blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2021/11/12/how-many-people-have-q-clearance/ https://web.archive.org/web/20211112214234/blog.nuclearsecre...
- colonelxc 5y agoA lot of people at the national labs have Q clearances, even if they never do nuclear stuff. As the article somewhat mentions, it's roughly 'Q=TS+nukes'. So if you need to do any TS stuff at a national lab, you're going to get a Q clearance.
- RyJones 5y agoThat was my first thought - PNNL spits out a ton of people with Q clearance
- chrisseaton 5y ago> So if you need to do any TS stuff at a national lab, you're going to get a Q clearance. Well you're going to apply for it but you're not necessarily going to get it.
- ganoushoreilly 5y agoIt's very rare that if you meet TS requirements you're not getting the Q (if you're placed in a position where it's needed as more than likely you are already SCI cleared). In fact if you are denied for Q it likely means you're losing your TS too. There are exceptions but I would argue they're not the norm. Either way, we have propensity to over classify things in the government and that's a whole other argument.
- a_lost_needle 5y agoPedantic irrelevance?
- samstave 5y agoI recall the two biggest stories about foreign spies in these labs: 1. Chinese blamed for stealing Los Alamos secret by stashing hard drives behind a copy machine and grabbing them later. 2. Chinese engineer at JPL worked there for decades and was thought to be a nice family in Pasadina - but lived in a really super spartan house and the wife was the engineer's handler and their kids were the mules to haul data back to ccp 3. China's trickle hack on Lockheed by phishing employees who had attended defense conferences 4. China hacking Lockheed providers in Taiwan with an air gap and sneaker-net to gain access to Lockheed laptops via USB exploits (this was one of the factors, IIRC why epoxy in USB ports was common) -- ((But if you ever had any SGI O2 machines -- there was an additional port (serial I think - I don't think they were USB) but this 'option' was several thousand more $ -- but it was on every machine and all you had to do was punch out the plastic cover from the case) 5. Israel + USA hacking Iran via STUXNET in the same method with air-gaps etc. 6. The guy who worked at oak ridge, took on a Russian Mail Order Bride and got her a job in oak ridge (accounting I think, I can't recall) -- and it turned out she was a Russian handler, but they denied it -- but everyone knew that every single person from the USG who went to Russia was assigned a female handler, and these handlers were highly trained, and they had several levels of handlers above them to ensure non-defection chain-of-custody-of-intel. --- I had a few more specific to nukes - but I got distracted - Ill update if I recall the others. Some of the above have REALLY good documentaries on them. Some of them are known by fewer people - but they are not secret breaches... they got memory-holed. 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/17/us/missing-nuclear-data-found-behind-a-los-alamos-copier.html https://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/17/us/missing-nuclear-data-f... 2.? -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wen_Ho_Lee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wen_Ho_Lee (I am not sure if I am conflating these with another case.) 5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOwMW6agpTI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOwMW6agpTI 6. I cant find 6..
- ThaDood 5y agoI'd be more curious about Top Secret - Full Scope.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y agoJust ask China. The US government conveniently handed them all cleared personnel records.
- imwillofficial 5y ago“Handed them” would be inaccurate.
- snerbles 5y ago"Handed them" may be an understatement, given the scope of the OPM breach. https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/09/congressional-report-slams-opm-on-data-breach/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/09/congressional-report-sla... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management_data_breach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management...
- imwillofficial 5y agoA breach is literally the opposite of willingly giving something over, or “handing it” to them.
- kelnos 5y agoI think you're being too literal. Using hyperbole here is the equivalent of saying "their security was so bad they might as well have just handed over the information".
- imwillofficial 5y agoYeah, you’re right. I just want to make sure people know it was a breach and not some form of leak.
- supernova87a 5y agoIsn't "Q" only a general top clearance and not really revealing how many people are privy to important secret information? I understood that Q indicates someone could be given access to certain information from a risk point of view, and only with some further project-specific reason would they actually have access to actual secrets.
- ocschwar 5y agoA Q clearance could mean you are privy to absolutely nothing. The janitors cleaning the buildings in the secure part of LANL all have Q clearances because they might, might, be exposed to classified information. Needless to say, just because they might poke their nose in the wrong office, doesn't mean they will. The less you know, the less the Lab wants to track your whereabouts after hours.
- Finnucane 5y agoNo, as the article tries to make clear, it is for handling of nuclear weapons-related information only. And yeah, people get it because they need to work in a lab or otherwise be proximate to the work, but aren't working directly on it themselves.
- acquacow 5y agoIt is definitely not for handling nuclear weapons-related information only. It's as generic as a normal TS in that agency and is even given temporarily to people coming in from outside agencies with a TS/Poly for meetings.
- itronitron 5y agoYes, a person with Q or TS would also need SCI and/or sigma clearances in order to access anything (without an escort).
- soneil 5y agoThe easiest way to understand is to picture if clearances didn't exist. If you had a requirement for certain material, someone would have to decide if you were safe, perhaps do background checks, get someone to vouch for you, etc. Clearances just standardize that, so you can trust that it's been performed within X years. You still don't share material without a requirement, you've just outsourced the other half.
- bhopro 5y agoFormer national lab engineer here. For access to any of the classified buildings, you must have a Q clearance or be escorted by someone with a Q clearance. This means all of facility staff are required to be cleared as well (janitorial, maintenance, etc). Just because one has a Q clearance does not mean you are provided any classified information.
- N1H1L 5y agoNational lab scientist here. All the janitors in my building have Q clearance. Half of my team does, and people really use it once every 2 years.
- pdpi 5y agoSomewhat related, a physicist friend of mine had diplomatic immunity while working at CERN, for no other reason than the fact that the LHC sits on the border between France and Switzerland, and most of the usual diplomatic privileges become pretty important when you’re potentially crossing the border several times a day, potentially importing and exporting expensive equipment.
- Symbiote 5y agoDiplomatic status for staff of international, intergovernmental organisations is common. Similar status applies to the ESA, ITER, and many others.
- chihuahua 5y agoThat could explain "Q Anon" - maybe his day job is polishing linoleum floors.
- irrational 5y agoMy father in law was a radio engineer (retired) that had a job installing equipment in a nuclear power plant. He had to go all over the facility for weeks. Based on the article, I would think his clearance would have been S, but the author seems to think S has been discontinued. I’ll have to ask him to see if he remembers when they come over for Thanksgiving.
- aerostable_slug 5y agoIt's possible his access authorization was granted by NRC, not DOE. I've gone through DOE/NNSA processes and what I needed for plant access (pentesting for a utility) was through NRC and a bit different.
- c0balt 5y agoYou don't get a role by having clearence. You get clearence and access to 'classified' materials by having a role. I think clearence has been overused as a dramaturgical element a lot but it sure as hell sounds cool.
- Threeve303 5y agoTechnically anyone that can gain enough access could be considered as having “Q clearance”
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- nimbius 5y agoThis isn't a meaningful question IMO. TS, S, polygraph level and SCI/SAP are really the only thing on your employee record with uncle Sam. There is no such thing as "above top secret" Q clearance is anyone with a CNWDI modifier, so that's secret and top secret.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Perceval 5y agoCNWDI is DOD-only. Q and L are DOE.
- qwertyuiop_ 5y agoProbably everyone fielded by Chinese intelligence.
- nataz 5y agoIf folks are curious about "Q clearances" (more appropriately called Q access authorization) I suggest you take a look at this DOE website on departmental security [1]. It will clear up some of the close to correct information floating around in this thread. Note, one of the very unusual things about a Q is access control for both information AND physical material. << Q: Back up a minute! You just mentioned a "Q" access authorization. What is that and how does it relate to the Top Secret, Secret, and Confidential clearance terminology I'm familiar with? A: Top Secret, Secret, and Confidential security clearances refer back to the level of National Security Information to which an individual may have access. Because DOE is granting access to Restricted Data and special nuclear material, it uses different terminology. Generally speaking, there are two types of access authorizations, the L and the Q. The L access authorization corresponds to the background investigation and administrative determination similar to what is completed by other agencies for Confidential and Secret National Security Information access clearances and the Q access authorization corresponds to the background investigation and administrative determination similar to what is completed by other agencies for a Top Secret National Security Information access clearance. In addition, because RD information is more sensitive than NSI information, access to Secret Restricted Data requires a Q access authorization. >> [1] https://www.energy.gov/ehss/security-policy-guidance-reports/departmental-personnel-security-faqs https://www.energy.gov/ehss/security-policy-guidance-reports...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- morelandjs 5y agoShameless plug for my former Fellowship, https://www.krellinst.org/ssgf/ https://www.krellinst.org/ssgf/ It’s a fast track to a high level position at one of the nuclear defense labs doing amazing work (fusion, defense, detection, etc). It’s non-binding (I currently work in tech), and highly supportive of the individual fellows.