# Security Clearance Tiers: Who Gets to Know What

## Overview

Information in GLMZ is stratified by access — a tier system that determines what each person is permitted to know, see, and access within the corporate infrastructure. The clearance system is managed by each corponation independently but follows a common framework established by the governance consortium, creating a city-wide hierarchy of information access that maps directly to social and economic power.

## The Tier System

### Tier 0: Public
Information available to all residents. Includes: public notices, basic wayfinding, UBC program information, emergency alerts, and the curated news feeds that Ringo's media division produces. Tier 0 information is carefully filtered — not censored exactly, but selected to present a version of reality that serves corporate interests.

### Tier 1: Resident
Information available to registered residents with verified identity. Includes: detailed city maps, public health advisories, community services, and the enhanced communications access that comes with identity verification. Approximately 95% of the population has Tier 1 access.

### Tier 2: Employee
Information available to corporate employees. Includes: corporate internal communications, workplace systems, professional databases, and the company-specific information that employees need to do their jobs. Tier 2 access is granted by the employing corponation and revoked upon termination — a restriction that makes job loss equivalent to information exile.

### Tier 3: Management
Information available to corporate management. Includes: strategic planning data, financial projections, personnel files, and the inter-corponation communications that management uses to coordinate shared governance functions. Tier 3 access reveals the machinery of corporate governance — the decisions, negotiations, and compromises that produce the policies Tier 0-2 citizens experience as facts of life.

### Tier 4: Executive
Information available to senior corporate executives. Includes: classified research data, intelligence assessments, military planning, and the full picture of corporate strategy. Tier 4 is where the real decisions are made — where the comfortable fictions of Tier 0 are revealed as deliberate constructions and the city's actual operating parameters become visible.

### Tier 5: Restricted
Information available only on a need-to-know basis to the most senior individuals in each corponation. Includes: weapons research, classified AI projects, strategic contingency plans, and the information about GLMZ's synthetic intelligences (particularly the Leviathans) that the governance consortium considers too sensitive for even Tier 4 access. Tier 5 clearance holders number in the low hundreds across all six corponations.

## The Knowledge Gap

The tier system creates a knowledge gap that is also a power gap. Shelf residents making decisions about their lives do so with Tier 0-1 information — a picture of reality that is accurate but incomplete. Corporate executives making decisions about the same residents' lives do so with Tier 4-5 information — a picture that includes the data, projections, and strategic considerations that Tier 0 citizens will never see.

This asymmetry is the fundamental mechanism of social control in GLMZ. The population is not repressed — they're uninformed. They make choices freely, but the information on which those choices are based is curated by the entities that benefit from specific choices being made. It's not a conspiracy. It's a system.