FLU: My old man was an aerospace engineer for Ford Aerospace in Palo Alto back in the early 1970s through the late 1980s (when he retired).
He worked on the Intelsat and Milsat (intelligence and military satellites, like the KH-11 Vulture) programs and had Top Secret clearance. He had worked on the F4 Phantom avionics program in El Segundo prior to that, where he also had a Top Secret clearance.
There was an instance when a Top Secret document was misplaced and they locked his building down for a day and a half, trying to find it. They even called in a USAF investigator following, and went through a rigorous teardown of existing procedures to make sure it didn’t happen again.
I grew up in the Bay Area during a period when defense companies like Lockheed, Ford Aerospace and the NAS Moffett/NASA Ames complex employed a lot of people, many of whom had Top Secret clearances. I also remember the fact that most of those folks did NOT discuss the projects or programs they were working on, simply because the risks were too high and you never knew who was listening (like when they discovered a Polish government spy posing as a janitor at Western Digital out in Sunnyvale).
The idea that some intern is running around with access to Top Secret data is hooey. Pure and simple.
