LABS: SLOPPY SECURITY FOR CLASSIFIED TECH

Security reg­u­la­tions for the han­dling of clas­si­fied tech­nolo­gies have been repeat­edly vio­lated at three of the country’s most impor­tant lab­o­ra­to­ries. That’s the con­clu­sion of the Energy Department’s Inspector General, who today issued a report detail­ing secu­rity woes at Los Alamos, Sandia, and Oak Ridge National Laboratories.
On mul­ti­ple occa­sions, the Inspector General found, for­eign nation­als were work­ing on secret research pro­grams — even though they have been specif­i­cally for­bid­den from doing so, since the Wen Ho Lee scan­dal. Officials at Sandia didn’t bother to go through the Department-​​required clas­si­fi­ca­tion and coun­ter­in­tel­li­gence reviews on key research and devel­op­ment deals. And there was no indi­ca­tion that the labs matched their employ­ment rolls against State and Treasury Department bad guy lists.
“We did not detect any direct evi­dence of a secu­rity com­pro­mise,” the IG’s report says. But “any break­down in the vig­or­ous appli­ca­tion of required safe­guards of lack of a clear pol­icy in this arena rep­re­sents a poten­tial threat to our nation’s security.”

January 14th, 2004 | Los Alamos and Labs | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.