Mark is the host this week for the seven o’clock hour on Fox News and as you know I really like him but as I have told you repeatedly I will call out either side if they don’t know what they are talking about.

Tonight he said there are 5 million people with US security clearances and all they have to do is turn on their computer and they have access to everything. Total bullshit!

Now the first reason I thought it was bs was because I thought the number was much higher because based on my experience I figured that every federal employee had to have a clearance. Then I looked it up and best as I can tell about 3 million people have federal security clearances, so that means that Steyn was wrong but not for the reason I thought. Then I remembered that my federal experience involved two agencies that were both working in areas that would naturally require clearances. While I was in engineering school in college, I co-oped at the Naval Air Rework Facility in Jacksonville which overhauled carrier based jets. I worked one quarter and went to school the next quarter for three years. Everyone had to get a confidential clearance which is the lowest level possible. I never saw any classified information while I was there.

The other job I had in the federal government required that I get a Q clearance before going to work. I have talked about this before, but a Q clearance qualifies you for access to top secret information and also access to Restricted Data. And as I have said before Restricted Data is defined in the Atomic Energy Act and for shorthand it has to do with how you build the bomb and/or enrich uranium. As an aside, I was on the UF faculty when this was going on and the FBI investigator ran into me at the law school and told me it was the first time he ever met the person he was investigating for a clearance.

So my experience led me to believe that all federal employees had at least a minimal clearance but now thinking about it, there is no reason for employees in the EEOC or NLRB or HHS etc., to have a security clearance. They will never see classified information and if it should become necessary in a given situation, then it could be investigated and granted on a need to know basis.

The reason for this rant is Mark’s claim that all these people with clearances can just turn on their computer and access all the nation’s classified information. Nothing could be further from the truth. That’s total nonsense. First even with the requisite security clearance you still need a need to know the information at issue and I have talked about this many times before.

Second there was no computer system that you could log into that gave you access to classified information. I know that back during the Hillary email scandal that it was revealed that in the State Department there was a separate, in-house computer system that was not connected to the internet for classified information but there was no such system in my agency and as I have mentioned before, for a significant part of my career I was the attorney responsible for national security matters. I had the appropriate safe but it rarely had any classified information in it and on only one occasion did it ever contain any information that was really sensitive and that was when I had to review a document for a FOIA request that actually had sensitive Restricted Data and when the powers to be found out I had it they came and took it back saying it shouldn’t have been given to me for review.

Unless the rules in the federal government have totally changed in the past 15 years, no one can just turn on their computer and access all classified information!