About this project and methodology
Purpose and scope
A private research tool that makes the complete public record of U.S. security-clearance decisions readable: 30,719 decisions (26,883 hearings and 3,836 Appeal Board rulings), searchable in full, summarized case by case, and counted transparently, with data through September 2026.
Built on that record: outcome statistics by concern, issue, judge, representation, and year, each shown with the number of cases behind it; timelines measured from the decisions’ own dates; per-case profiles that set out the allegations, what the judge credited as mitigating, and the decided cases closest to it; and plain-language guides to the process, the thirteen adjudicative guidelines, the letters people receive, and the countries that appear most often in foreign-ties cases. An assistant answers questions from that record together with a vetted reference library, cites the real decisions behind what it says, and describes what the record shows rather than predicting anyone’s outcome.
A separate section covers 1,485 Department of Energy access-authorization decisions, kept apart from the Defense record so that two different systems are never counted or quoted as one.
For anyone working a live matter, the research sits alongside working tools: saved searches that send an alert when new decisions match, side-by-side case comparison, citable exports, and a prepared report for a person answering a Statement of Reasons.
It was built by subject-matter specialists in clearance adjudication, for the three groups who need this record: individuals with questions about the security clearance process, the attorneys who represent them, and researchers studying how adjudication operates. It is not affiliated with DOHA, DCSA, DoD, or the U.S. Government.
Where the data comes from
Every decision is a public record published by the Defense Office of Hearings and Appeals. We collect the published files, extract their text and facts, and preserve the original PDF on every case page, so every CASE representation can be checked directly against the source.
Prior research
Several of the questions this site measures were first asked elsewhere. “Data Analysis of Security Clearance Appeal Decisions,” a 2018 study by Sarah E. Miller for the CERT National Insider Threat Center at Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute, is the closest published antecedent to this work. Whether candor allegations resolve differently from other concerns, how much the time since the conduct matters, and how applicants with military service fare were its questions before they were ours. Our pages on candor, time since conduct, veterans, and the Bond Amendment exist because that study asked them first.
It hand-tagged about 5,000 cases from an earlier copy of this record; the figures here are measured directly from the full current record, and where the two overlap they agree. This site is independent of that study, of the Software Engineering Institute, and of Carnegie Mellon University, and describing it here is a statement of intellectual debt, not of any affiliation or endorsement.
How summaries and statistics are made, and checked
Extraction organizes the record; verification determines what is displayed. The discipline:
- Grounding checks. Extracted allegation text is verified against the decision’s own words by automated checks. Text that cannot be grounded is replaced with a source-limited “not stated in the decision” (never invented), and anything below our confidence bar is visibly flagged on the page.
- AI never rewrites the record. Verbatim legal text is displayed from the source or not at all. The case summaries are built only from separately verified facts and are gated by checks before display.
- Sampling audits. Summaries and outcomes are audited line-by-line against source decisions in repeated sampled batches. When an audit finds a failure mode, the affected data is regenerated corpus-wide, not patched over.
- Verified case types. Whether a decision is a hearing or an appeal is read from the decision text itself (the source labels were unreliable), and hearing and appeal outcomes are never mixed in one statistic. In our audit of the appeal corpus, the Board’s stated outcome matched our independent read in 100% of sampled cases.
- Transparent denominators. Every rate says how many cases it is based on; small samples are flagged as unreliable rather than displayed as fact; thin years are shown as volume, not noisy percentages.
Reading the statistics
- Granted = access granted or continued; Denied = denied or revoked.
- Grant rate = granted ÷ (granted + denied).
- † marks figures based on fewer than 20 cases, too few to be reliable.
- Hovering any rate shows its statistical range (a 95% confidence interval).
- Figures are descriptive counts over decided, public DOHA ISCR decisions, never predictions or assessments of any pending case.
Every chart on the Statistics page follows the filter bar, except the appeals section, which follows the year and concern filters only.
Known limits
Early years are thin because the public archive is: DOHA published few hearing decisions online before 2002, and almost none survive for 1999–2000, so small early-year counts reflect the record itself. Published decisions are redacted by the government, and no extraction process is perfect, which is why the preserved original PDF, above, is the control, and why we correct verified errors (see Disclaimers).
Operating rules
- The public record remains free to read.
- Everything is descriptive, never a prediction, score, or advice.
- Uploads are private, encrypted, deletable, and auto-expiring (see Privacy & Security).
- When CASE cannot verify a point, the page says so.
Where to go from here
Get help with my case
Send us your question, or the Statement of Reasons you received. No charge, and a CASE analyst reads it. Usually five to ten business days.
Ask a question →I do this for clients
Rank every decision by how closely it matches a matter, see how the assigned judge has ruled, and keep it together with cited exports.
For attorneys and firms →Decided public cases: descriptive, never a prediction.