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For decades, much of the federal government’s security clearance process was based on techniques that emerged in the mid-twentieth century.
“It’s very manual,” said Evan Lesser, head of ClearanceJobs, a website posting, jobs, news, and advice for positions involving security clearances. “Walking around in cars to meet people. It is very old and takes a lot of time.”
A federal initiative that began in 2018, Reliable Workforce 2.0 It officially introduced semi-automatic analysis of federal employees that happens in near real time. This program will allow the government to use artificial intelligence to subject employees seeking or already holding security clearances to “continuous review and evaluation”—basically, rolling assessment that constantly pulls information, raises red flags, and includes self-reporting and human analysis.
“Can we build a system that checks and constantly checks someone and is aware of that person’s inclination because it is constantly present in legal systems and public record systems?” Chris Grijalva, senior technical director at Peraton, a company that focuses on the government side of insider analysis, said: “And from that idea came the concept of continuous assessments.”
Such efforts have been used in government in more private ways since the 1980s. But the 2018 announcement was aimed at modernizing government policies, which typically reassess employees every five or 10 years. The motivation for the adjustment in policy and practice was, in part, the backlog of investigations needed and the idea that circumstances and people were changing.
“That’s why it’s so appealing to keep people under some kind of constant, ever-evolving surveillance process,” said Martha Louise Deutscher, author of Scanning the System: Uncovering Security Permission Hazards. “You’re going to do credit checks every day, and you’re going to do penalties every day – and bank accounts, marital status – and you’re going to make sure people don’t run into situations that they would face. It would have become a risk if it weren’t for yesterday.”
The first phase of the program is a transition period before full implementation. finished in the fall of 2021. In December, the US Government Accountability Office suggested evaluation of the effectiveness of automation (although not continuously).
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