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Comment by QuarterReptile | Hacker News Reader

From reading a DOE website, it looks like the sigma clearance is the one that relates to weapons, whereas Q maybe is less specific and can include energy production.

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You need Q for certain facilities as well, SWIM had one and it was just to work in the building, and there wasn't anything going on there of particular interest

Just because you had no legitimate access to anything interesting doesn’t mean there was nothing interesting you could have accidentally or nefariously accessed.

I had a clearance doing tech support, but never even saw actual classified materials. But because as IT support we also had to support SCIF facilities, high-ranking officials with potentially sloppy OpSec, etc we obviously still needed clearances.

Which makes sense, all the security policies in the world enforced by IT fall apart when you assume the rogue (or even just accidental) actor is IT.

Q is clearance for persons, sigma is classification of data.

Sounds like Q is pretty broad. It can also include cryptography.

cryptography would fall under TS/SCI through an intelligence agency or the DoD. Q is actually pretty narrow

I knew some number theorists at the NSA who claimed have Q clearance (long before QAnon was a thing). As far as I know, they know nothing about nukes. Have I been punked, or is the NSA a branch of the DoD?

This is pure speculation: if someone worked on some kind of communication involving nuclear missiles, they might work for the NSA and have Q. But otherwise I can’t think of a reason they would. That said, NSA is a world almost wholly unknown to me

What I know: clearance is compartmentalized. The NSA's mandate is both to break foreign crypto, and protect sensitive communication. That includes, possibly, the means to break domestic communication about, well, anything, including nukes. The laws and policies regarding this are, themselves, secret. There's even a secret court. The existence of these secret courts and secret laws has recently been affirmed as legitimate by the supreme court.

So, no shit you're speculating, and I very well may have been lied to by the person attempting to recruit me to the NSA. I didn't want to live in secrecy; soon thereafter, Thomas Drake's reports confirmed my suspicion that the NSA wasn't as white-hat as I'd been told.

I don't fully follow your comment or necessarily know what you mean by a "branch", but the NSA is explicitly part of the DOD.

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