Trailers, Secrets And Los Alamos

[Ibby]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15566388/site/newsweek/

Nov. 13, 2006 issue - It began as a routine police call. At 4:16 p.m. on Oct. 17, two Los Alamos County police officers were dispatched to the Royal Crest Trailer Park. The cluster of mobile homes is located next to Los Alamos National Laboratory, the sprawling New Mexico compound that houses one of America's two main facilities for designing nuclear weapons. A resident had complained that two neighbors were shouting at each other and throwing rocks through the windows of their trailer. The cops expected to find the usual: a domestic dispute that had gotten out of hand. Instead, they discovered what one Los Alamos official—who, like all lab and government sources in this story, would not be named talking about sensitive matters—calls "potentially the greatest breach of national security" in decades.

When the police entered the trailer, they found 20-year-old Justin Stone and his girlfriend. Stone said he was a guest of the trailer's owner, 23-year-old Jessica Quintana, who wasn't there at the time. Stone was wanted on a probation violation from an earlier crime. So the police arrested him. When they later got a search warrant, the cops found what appeared to be the makings of a crude personal crystal-meth lab. (Stone later pleaded no contest to possession of drug paraphernalia.) Among the dozens of items they hauled away were three computer thumb drives—the small storage devices that plug into a USB port and can hold hundreds of megabytes of data.

The police plugged the memory sticks into their computers. They found more than 400 pages of classified documents downloaded from Los Alamos computers, some containing sensitive data on nuclear-weapons design. A quick check revealed that Quintana had until recently been employed by a contractor at Los Alamos. A file clerk who worked in the lab's document-storage vaults, her job was to scan aging paper documents into a modern digital format. The police called the FBI, which discovered another cache of nuclear documents: 456 paper pages, many stamped SECRET—RESTRICTED DATA.

Quintana has not been arrested or charged with any crime. Her lawyer, Steven Aarons, told NEWSWEEK that she took all the material home one afternoon in early August because she was under deadline pressure to create an index of what she had digitized. When she was finished, Aarons says, Quintana intended to destroy the material. "She wanted to take it to a shredder ... She never did so."
CONTINUED

[Ibby]

If a simple clerk can get her hands on it so easily...
Just imagine what a well-coordinated team of spies could do?

Huh, 'keeping america secure' my ass. Maybe the Dems can do better?

[Beestie]

Or maybe the information is worthless. Or a honeypot.

"Nuclear secrets" are fast becoming oxymoronic. Today's cutting-edge research is tomorrow's fifth-grade "get Daddy to help you with that" science project.

[Aliantha]

Well...Lisa Simpson did it didn't she?

[tw]

Two separate issues here. First was she working for someone or a free-lancing spy? Details such as what she said before and after she lawyered up are not provided. Therefore we don't know.

Second, why is security so lax? Well, it was routine and easy to carry secure documents out of building - even before electronic storage mediums. So much of security - exactly same as in quality - is found in attitude and knowledge of the people. Just like in quality, little is accomplished by Quality Control inspectors - not to be confused with Quality Assurance.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

As a former intelligence professional, I'd say contractor understanding of information security is still not uniformly good -- putting it mildly. We had this kind of problem with "The Falcon and the Snowman," too.

Fundamentally, security, OPSEC, and the like are accomplished by the integrity of the employees: even the security measures in place at NSA Fort George G. Meade could have been defeated by a determined effort to smuggle data out. For a time, anyway. But what's routine is something like the Vegas tagline -- what's in NSA, stays in NSA.

Intelligence work is like a specialized form of journalism: you assemble the information, organize it intelligibly -- but you're very much pickier about who your customers are.

You want secret keepers, you screen for personal integrity.