Over 2 million people in the US have security clearances of Top Secret and above.
The figures have emerged as Barack Obama's government faces questions about how Private Bradley Manning had access to the 700,000 classified military documents he leaked to Wikileaks.
Yesterday he was sentenced to 35 years in jail for the leaks, but it's likely he'll serve a much shorter sentence.
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Harlan Ullman is a senior advisor at the Atlantic Council in Washington; he says Manning clearly broke the law, but the bigger question of how the government protects its classified information has yet to be addressed:
