I’ve seen a couple diaries on this site hand-wringing about whether Trump will be cancelling the 2018 elections, or something similar. That’s not how this works. One of the LAST things a dictator might get rid of is the pomp and circumstance of an election, and the veneer of credibility it lends to their regime.
What autocrats do instead is interfere with their opponents. They interfere with their ability to politically organize, they interfere with their ability to put the most charismatic candidates on the ballot, and they attack the very livelihoods of their opponents. The elections happen and real ballots may even be counted, but the playing field is anything but fair.
This security clearance threat is exactly one of those maneuvers. Most of the pundits have missed it, but plenty of federal workers have heard it loud and clear. Don’t criticize Trump or your job and livelihood might be at stake.
Let’s take apart the threat piece by piece.
1) The threat is purely political.
Sarah Sanders accused an ‘enemies list’ of ‘monetizing’ their security clearance and making ‘baseless’ and ‘unsubstantiated’ accusations against the current occupant of the white house. Both sides of this accusation are so absurd as to be transparent to any security clearance holder.
James Clapper, James Comey, John Brennan, and others do not ‘monetize’ their security clearances. To the extent that they are compensated for appearances on CNN, they are monetizing the perspective of a senior government leader with long experience in a field. Low level government employees just aren’t booked for CNN interviews, and just having a security clearance gives on very little to profit on.
At this point, accusations of Trump being mixed up with a foreign adversary government are anything but ‘baseless’. Rachel Maddow, Seth Abramson, and others have laid out blistering piles of evidence that is currently in public. At worst, accusations of wrongdoing can be disparaged as ‘circumstantial’. To retread an old republican talking point from the Iraq war buildup, even if Trump’s actions are not criminal, they are certainly unpatriotic and unbecoming the president of the united states.
Hell, even republicans acknowledge the mountain of evidence against el Presidente’s patriotism. They’ll twist and turn with all kinds of ‘deep state’ and ‘media bias’ misdirection, but they’ll acknowledge it.
The only thing left is the obvious connecting thread that those on the ‘enemies list’ is that they have been critical of Donald Trump.
2) The threat is easy to carry out.
Security clearance holders are scrutinized during their background check process, and the government maintains a file on each and every one. The security forms are invasive and probing, and accepting a security clearance means giving up a little of your right to privacy. Clearance holders know this.
Have you ever donated $200 or more to a political candidate in one season? Guess what, you’re on a list at the FEC. All it takes is a records search to match you and your donation and your clearance could be on the line.
Ever voted in a Democratic party primary? Ever lit into someone on Facebook over Trump’s policies? Ever posted on a liberal blog or liberal activist site? Belong to a liberal activist church like UU? Ever had a loud argument in the office over politics that one time?
There are a hundred and one ‘easy’ ways to spot liberals with security clearances. People with clearances not only know this, but regular annual security training reinforces this.
3) Being a target has immediate, devastating consequences.
For this one, I’m going to give a little background on how the federal government uses security clearances in practice. The wikipedia article: en.wikipedia.org/… tells only part of the story.
A ‘secret’ level clearance (the lowest level commonly issued) is a common way for government offices to handle whether an employee is ‘trustworthy’. Access to most DoD networks requires a security clearance, even if it is an unclassified network. Access to any FOUO (For Official Use Only) or SBU (Sensitive but Unclassified) information is often restricted to cleared people by blanket clearance requirements for employment. Look on USAJOBS and see how many of the openings require a security clearance as a condition of employment.
(If you’re interested as to why, there are terms like ‘aggregate’ and ‘collateral’ and ‘synthesis’ that talk about the ability to gather insight that would be classified if enough SBU information was gathered together and presented in the right way. It is also a much smaller issue if classified information is spilled to people with an appropriate clearance, as opposed to uncleared individuals.)
Health information and personal identity information also require protection and often a ‘security clearance’ is a stand in for trustworthiness in protecting that stuff too, same for competition sensitive, acquisition sensitive, and operationally sensitive info. Even secretaries and janitorial staff often have background checks or clearance paperwork. Think not just DOD, VA, Department of Energy, CDC, Homeland Security, Social Security Administration, and plenty more, including all of their major support contractors.
A former CIA officer on NPR this morning made a mistake talking about ‘regular access to classified information’. In an intelligence office, that might be the case, but for the majority of cleared workers, seeing actual classified information is a rare event (and often quite the pain in the ass, which is why they will often jump through hoops to avoid it if they can).
In offices like that, losing one’s clearance, even temporarily, is a huge problem. It requires an immediate termination of access to email and IT infrastructure. Employees can no longer discuss anything sensitive about work with the person whose clearance has been pulled. Executing one’s job duties under those conditions is almost impossible. If the employer is nice they may re-task an employee to another job function. If not, they might be summarily dismissed.
4) The ripple effect of a policy (and to some extent even the threat of one) can be huge
OK, so in (3) i talked about direct effects on having one’s clearance pulled. There is another, subtler message to supervisors, employers, and administrators. The message is ‘your liberals are a liability’. Think about the number of work-hours wasted shutting down an employees accounts, changing their access to buildings, clearing out their desk, and hiring and training a replacement for their job with no notice and no opportunity for a hand-off.
It’s not hard to imagine the ‘chilling effect’ this would have. It could work its way into office culture, hiring practices, promotions, and any number of second and third order effects.
Conclusion
I don’t think I am going too far on a limb here to say that an attack on people’s security clearances is a direct attack on the USA as a democracy. Federal employees take an oath to defend the constitution of the United States. Security clearances are based on whether a person is trustworthy with secrets that can impact the national security of the United States. Loyalty to a political party or a person is relevant to neither.
Right now, Trump’s ‘enemies list’ is made up entirely of political appointees all retired, but that is only a razor’s edge away from career civil servants, and all of them can see it. By using such transparent language, Trump is literally asserting the authority to persecute a large swath of the federal-industrial complex workforce, and telegraphing a willingness to do so for purely political purposes.
This is not OK. This is a concrete move toward autocracy.