What Ever Happened to Adjudication?

The Wall Street Journal had the wrong emphasis on a story running today.  Paying people to spy on their employers is as old as intelligence collection.  The slant was that people in other countries, especially China, are buying people here and collecting information they can’t steal any other way.  That part is old news.

What isn’t is the Chinese now have our security clearance information which, among many other things, includes financial records and concerns by investigators of financial discrepancies - like living beyond your means, or having credit problems.  They don’t need to go far to find out who to target.

To me, this is not the problem it should be.  We have allowed this by giving the Chinese the security clearance records ( total malfeasance) but more importantly by doing nothing about the issues raised by these investigations.  If the Chinese can pick out a guy whole owes thousands of dollars in bad debts, the agency that employed that person should be able to.  That should lead to a reinvestigation, calling the person in, stating the facts and getting the situation fixed.  Without that, the person thinks the investigators thought his debts were OK, when they probably didn’t.  The process requires a readjudication of the person’s access to classified information.  The person knows about the concern; the government knows the concern, and they track progress.  That is a good deterrent to selling secrets to an enemy, but we aren’t using it very well.