In October 2017 an anonymous person or group calling themselves “Q Clearance Patriot” began posting on the 4Chan internet forum, claiming to have high level security clearance. Through their posts QAnon, as they became known, claimed to be perpetrating the largest security intelligence disclosure in the history of the world, at the behest of US President Donald Trump.
Through a series of thousands of posts on 4chan and later on 8chan, QAnon outlined Donald Trump's plans to work with the military intelligence community to wage war on corruption and organised crime in the highest levels of government, taking on the entities known as the Deep State and Shadow Government.
Q Clearance is an extremely high level security clearance, often associated with US Department of Energy. It is comparable to Top Secret clearance but with additional access to Sensitive Compartmentalised Information Facilities (SCIFs). It is the most permissive clearance granted by the United States Government, acting as the sole means of access to the vast amounts of compartmentalised Top Secret and Secret Restricted Data as well as DOE security areas.
According to the Federation of American Scientists, Q Clearance allows access to special nuclear material. “An employee with a Q sensitive clearance could have access to nuclear weapons design, manufacture, or use data.” Despite is association with the Department of Energy, someone with Q Clearance does not necessarily have to work solely for the DOE but could have “the highest level of security within all departments”, QAnon said.
If QAnon is genuine, they would be in a unique position to offer insight into military and intelligence issues, including the spying on the Trump election campaign by the Obama Administration and the fabricated Russian hacking of Democratic Party emails. QAnon would even have access to nuclear secrets, including inside knowledge of the Uranium One scandal, in which the Obama administration, along with Hillary Clinton, transferred 20% of US uranium to Russia. They would also have insights into the unexpected denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula.
In the fictional 1986 book 'Q Clearance' by Peter Benchley, "A government employee may be cleared Top Secret but without a Q Clearance he can't see any paperwork or receive any information about atomic energy. Q Clearance gives you access to all materials pertaining to atomic energy." A character with Q Clearance "is overwhelmed with important, unintelligible documents and most bewilderingly of all he is singled out by the President of the United States as the one man who speaks The Truth".