MORE SECURITY SHENANIGANS AT LOS ALAMOS

A for­mer secu­rity spe­cial­ist at Los Alamos National Laboratory claims man­agers of the world’s most impor­tant nuclear research facil­ity “pur­posely thwarted an e-​​mail mon­i­tor­ing pro­gram designed to pre­vent secu­rity leaks,” Government Executive reports.
In January 2001, the Energy Department launched a pilot ver­sion of its Electronic Mail Analysis Capability (EMAC) pro­gram as part of larger effort to beef up coun­ter­in­tel­li­gence mea­sures.
Under pres­sure from the University of California, which man­ages the lab for the Energy Department, “some man­agers at Los Alamos attempted to delay and even­tu­ally stop the EMAC project,” accord­ing to the arti­cle.
In an April 4th let­ter to Los Alamos interim direc­tor George Nanos, for­mer Office of Internal Security employee Jack Harris “claimed that he was told by a man­ager to do ‘what­ever [he] could to delay and defer the imple­men­ta­tion of this pro­gram.’”

The man­ager allegedly told him that the University of California did not want the Energy Department ana­lyz­ing e-​​mails. The uni­ver­sity was wor­ried that sci­en­tists at Los Alamos would object to the prac­tice and would revolt, caus­ing a greater prob­lem than the pos­si­ble loss of data. 

Concerns about sci­en­tists’ sen­si­tiv­i­ties have under­mined sev­eral secu­rity mea­sures at the trou­bled lab. As pre­vi­ously noted, many guards at Los Alamos patrol the grounds with­out their guns. That’s because some sci­en­tists viewed the armed patrols as a kind of “occu­py­ing army” at the lab, a mem­ber of the secu­rity team told Defense Tech.

April 22nd, 2003 | Uncategorized | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.