WHY TOOLS ARE EASY TO GET AND USE

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Why are hacking and information warfare tools and weapons of mass destruction easy to get and use? Easy answer: They can be stolen!

For example, investigators at Los Alamos National Laboratory, in 2000, discovered that computer hard drives containing nuclear weapons data and other highly sensitive material stored in a vault at the laboratory had disappeared, according to several United States Government officials. The hard drives were stored in locked containers inside a vault in the nuclear weapons division of the national laboratory. Officials reported that the hard drives were missing on June 1, 2000 after officials went to search for them following the forest fires in the area. The containers remained in the vault, but the hard drives were gone.

The material, stored in the vault of the laboratory’s X Division, where nuclear weapons are designed, contained what officials described as nuclear weapons data used by the government’s Nuclear Emergency Search Team, or NEST, which responds to nuclear accidents and nuclear-related threats from terrorists. The material includes all the data on American nuclear weapons that the team needs to render nuclear devices safe in emergencies. In addition, the missing material included intelligence information concerning the Russian nuclear weapons program.

The Energy Department’s security czar at the time, Eugene E. Habiger, conducted an intensive search and investigation at Los Alamos but did not find the data. He has written a secret report on the matter, and the FBI has been brought in to assist with the investigation. Officials said they remained uncertain whether the data has been misplaced or stolen.

The disappearance of the nuclear weapons data represents a major embarrassment for a laboratory that had already spent the past year under scrutiny for lax security in connection with the Wen Ho Lee case. As previously mentioned, Dr. Lee was a scientist at Los Alamos who was fired in March 1999 for security violations after being the subject of a counter-intelligence investigation that looked into evidence that China had stolen American nuclear secrets.

Dr. Lee was never charged with espionage, but after he was dismissed, investigators accused him of downloading and copying vast amounts of secret nuclear weapons data from a secure computer at Los Alamos into an unclassified computer network and onto portable tapes. Dr. Lee was arrested in December 1999, on charges of mishandling classified material.

The discovery of Dr. Lee’s unauthorized downloads in April 1999, prompted then Energy Secretary Bill Richardson to order a shutdown of the lab’s computer systems, while mandating security training sessions for Los Alamos employees. Congress later passed legislation creating a new nuclear weapons agency within the Energy Department to oversee Los Alamos and the nation’s other nuclear weapons laboratories. The new security breach is believed to have occurred long after Dr. Lee was dismissed.

Energy Department officials indicated that they notified the FBI as soon as they discovered that the material was missing. But some law enforcement officials say that officials at the lab downplayed the fact that the data was missing from the vault, and assumed that the hard drives would turn up somewhere else in the lab. The officials are said to have assumed that the material was in use somewhere in the lab by Los Alamos scientists. The fact that the missing data included intelligence reports, has led law enforcement officials to become skeptical that the material was simply misplaced. The hard drives were eventually found near a trash-can. Questions remain: Who took them? And how much classified material was downloaded before they were eventually found?

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