Number of people accessing US classified data down 12 percent in one year

The US government is tightening the reins on the number of employees and contractors with access to classified information. A report to Congress from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said the number of cleared people dropped by 635,000 in 2014 from the year prior.

Despite the purge, that left a whopping 4.5 million people with security clearances. There was a nearly 15 percent reduction in new and renewed clearances, the report said. And government workers and contractors having "top secret" clearance declined by more than 100,000 people, to about 1.4 million.

"These decreases were the result of efforts across the USG to review and validate whether an employee or contractor still requires access to classified information and several additional Department of Defense (DoD) initiatives to review its cleared population," the April report said.

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