[tomschlick]

> How many people in USA work for the FBI, CIA, NSA, police departments, have top secret security clearances? Millions of them.

To be fair, the number of people who had direct access to the NSA/CIA exploit archives was probably in the hundreds. TS information is usually compartmentalized so only the people who need to access it can (known as TS-SCI).

Still bad that they have that many who can access it, but not in the millions.

[easilyBored]

Turns out I'm right. I thought about the military and contractors as well. "A Top Secret clearance, meanwhile, costs the government nearly 20 times more, at an average of $3,959 per background check. At that rate, investigating the 1.5 million people with Top Secret passes may have cost as much as $5.9 billion over several years. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/03/24...

"As of last October, nearly five million people held government security clearances. Of that, 1.4 million held top-secret clearances. More than a third of those with top-secret clearances are contractors, which would appear to include Mr. Snowden." https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323495604578535...

Now we can get into semantics until the cows come home but even tens of thousands of people are way too many. Imagine 1+ million people.

[tomschlick]

My point was that while tens of thousands have TS clearance, they only get access to specific information if and when they need it.

Its not like they go to the "Top Secret File Share" and have access to everything that is Top Secret across the government.

[jpitz]

A TS clearance isn't some magical pass card to every piece of TS information.

[easilyBored]

I know you can't walk to NSA HQ and demand to see everything that they have in TS but Snwoden and Manning case showed that stuff isn't that compartmentalized

[mtgx]

Don't you think at least some of those programs will eventually be pushed to the police? It's already happening in the UK where the police's cyber units now have almost the same hacking and surveillance (legal) powers as the GCHQ. Obama signed a new policy just days before he left the office to allow the NSA to share information with 17 other agencies. And that includes the DHS with its "fusion centers," where it shares data with the police.

And let's not forget how the FBI allowed the police to use stingrays illegally and taught them how to hide them from judges in various ways, including claiming the tools were under NDA and they couldn't tell judges about it. Or when they absolutely had to tell the judges about it, they'd prefer to drop the cases (against drug lords, child pornographers, murderers, etc) so as to not reveal the use of the tools.

And on and on it goes like this.