by CKR
So there has been another security breach attributed to the Los Alamos National Laboratory. But this one isn’t getting the same attention as earlier ones: Wen Ho Lee (apparently not a spy, btw) and a young archivist whose boyfriend was a druggie.
There have been security breaches in other parts of the government, but they didn’t get the attention that Los Alamos did; laptops for sale in the Kabul bazaar with military stuff, Department of Energy and FBI laptops gone missing. The stories seldom tell us, of course, what the secrets were, so it’s possible that the secrets for sale in Kabul had passed their “use by” date and that the DOE was trafficking in stuff that Enron doesn’t want us to know, not nuclear weapons design data.
But this one seems to involve “top-secret restricted data,” which, if the media are using that term correctly, seems to be nuclear weapons design data. The person involved, who “inadvertently” transmitted the data by e-mail, is named in very few of the stories. He seems to be a person who commonly flies under the radar. Let’s google Harold P. Smith and see what we find: not much. He seems to be a visiting professor at Berkeley and a member of the board of the private company that now runs Los Alamos under a contract to the Department of Energy.
So is it that the left-coast University of California has been properly subdued by the defense contractors and no longer needs to be flogged? Is it that this leaker has many more friends in high places than that junior archivist or the Chinese computer jock?
Why does a board member need nuclear weapons design data? Why was it being e-mailed among members of the board? Could it have anything to do with their (successful) bid to manage Livermore too?
Scooter Libby and others in the Office of the Vice President claimed they didn’t know that it was secret that Valerie Plame was an undercover agent. Smith claimed he didn’t know that this data was secret, either. As I recall, classified stuff used to have big red markings on each page. Is it the red color or the words that these folks don’t understand? Or is it the passing along by word of mouth that’s confusing?
It was human error, says Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman. I guess that makes it okay, a good reason for the Department to have covered it up while prosecuting that junior archivist. Keep that in mind the next time you receive an e-mail about how to make a bomb. (Thought that ci.al. stuff was something else, hm?)
