Special Weapons Agency May Be Leaking Secrets

[William Knowles <wk () C4I ORG>]

http://www.insightmag.com/archive/200012194.shtml

By Sean Paige
paige () insightmag com

Many Americans may not know what the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA) is or does, and thats probably just as well as
far as the Pentagon auxiliary agency is concerned. But you can bet
that potential U.S. adversaries, who one day may wind up on the
business end of one of the exotic new weapons that DARPA is charged
with conceptualizing, not only know what it is, but would die to get a
sneak peek behind the veil of secrecy surrounding it.

That might be easier than it ought to be, according to a recent
security critique by the Department of Defenses Office of the
Inspector General (IG), which found that DARPA controls over foreign
visitors were weak and may have led to the disclosure of sensitive
technical information that the United States would rather not spread
around.

The Pentagon has rules for clearing foreign nationals visiting its
research facilities and explicit protocols concerning when and what
kind of sensitive or classified information can be shared with them,
according to the IG. But DARPA hosted foreign visitors without
understanding or following those guidelines in 208 of 270 instances
reviewed by the IG, possibly resulting in the release of sensitive,
and even classified, information.

In several instances cited by the IG, visiting foreign military
personnel may have been briefed at higher security-clearance levels
than authorized because guidance from above either was not passed on
to the U.S. officials hosting the visit or disregarded by them.
Although DARPA also has rules controlling access to noncitizens who
work for U.S. corporations, universities or research laboratories, it
infrequently abides by them, according to the report, and its Security
Information Management System database often contains incomplete or
inaccurate information about the hundreds of foreign visitors it is
supposed to track. The IG found that about 30 percent of the
individuals listed in the database had incorrect security-clearance
ratings assigned to them, meaning they mistakenly could be granted
access to materials which should be denied them.

To illustrate the possible security problems that result, the IG cites
numerous instances in which DARPA officials only belatedly learned or
realized that they had been meeting with nationals from countries of
concern, including China and Syria, because of inadequate advance
notice or inaccurate database information. Because foreign nationals
can claim to represent a U.S. entity and visit DARPA with almost no
control, warns the IG, foreign nationals may be gathering sensitive
information without DARPAs knowledge.



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