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: 30,316 decisions (26,677 hearings and 3,639 Appeal Board rulings), searchable in full, summarized case by case, and counted transparently, with data through July 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.

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). Every Insights chart honors the filter bar except the appeals section, which honors the year and concern filters only. Figures are descriptive counts over decided, public DOHA ISCR decisions, never predictions or assessments of any pending case.

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.