If 4 million people have access to confidential information, is this information still secret?
http://watchingamerica.com/News/218010/we-are-all-undercover-agents/
Nowadays, even storekeepers must have security clearance; not only those who work directly for the government, but also these carrying over boxes for the government’s private contractors. At the moment, more than 4 million Americans are given “top secret” clearance. Five hundred thousand of them are working for private contractors such as Booz Allen Hamilton, which hired Snowden, where 12,000 workers have clearance and access to the data which are likely to "leak."
Regardless of what Washington thinks of Snowden, the conclusions are as follows: With such a large number of people having access to “top secret” information, leakage is inevitable. And this whole security clearance “legion” — created in America’s paranoid reaction to Sept. 11 — is a consequence of secrecy about everything. David E. Sanger writes in The Washington Post that for Washington, everything is confidential and everything is online. Bradley Manning downloaded documents from the embassy in Beijing while staying in Iraq; Snowden operated at a small base in Hawaii.
Among actually important “top secret” documents, there is a whole lot of completely unnecessary information, such as regular press releases.
To process such a huge amount of data a whole army of people, programs and money is needed, not to mention the fact that government agencies tend to duplicate themselves and often do the same job. If 4 million people have access to the confidential information, is this information still secret? And finally: Is it really surprising that among these 4 million people there is someone who will want to share it with the rest of the world? It is only a wonder that there are not more Snowdens or Mannings.
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