I suppose it depends on why they don’t have security clearance. If it’s someone who could never qualify for it, that would need to be announced and explained.
If it’s simply a candidate who doesn’t yet have it, that’s something that should be known for the same reasons. They don’t have all the information other candidates do, but are operating with the information they do have.
You are absolutely correct, and my snarky reply leads toward this tendency to call an organization as a monolithic entity that has agendas when the actual issue could be any number of other things, probably all of them, in a quagmire together:
Resistance to change and outside pressure, factionialization within the group that leads to the request being impeded, corruption, organized crime, institutional failure, racism, nationalism, cronyism, outdated training, lack of training in general…
There could be a good number of people trying to comply with the policy and simply failing. We just don’t know the full truth.
You are older than me, I suppose. I was playing it at 11 years old or so. My first CRPG, although my dad had run a D&D game for the family a few years prior so I had a reference point.
I remember my cousin telling us about the Creeping Coins and my imagination went wild, assuming you could loot them and they’d attack you later from your inventory.