Elite FBI team examining Los Alamos hard drives

[InfoSec News <isn () C4I ORG>]

http://www.marketwatch.newsalert.com/bin/story?StoryId=Cou2AWbebDxmTBNvJBgvHCG&FQ=v%25upi&Title=Headline

United Press International - June 19, 2000 13:45


By MICHAEL KIRKLAND

WASHINGTON, June 19 (UPI) -- An elite FBI computer team was examining
two Los Alamos hard drives in Washington Monday to see if their
nuclear secrets have been accessed.

The drives disappeared weeks ago at the New Mexico nuclear laboratory,
then reappeared just as mysteriously last Friday.

The FBI's Computer Analysis Response Team, or CART, is a group of
specially trained computer experts.

Bill Carter, an FBI spokesman, said CART "will try to determine if
those hard drives were accessed" for the secret information they
contain, among other tests.

Carter and the bureau's National Security Division discounted reports
of any dramatic announcement out of the FBI Monday, such as the
results of the tests. The Energy Department also said it would have no
Los Alamos announcement Monday, but said the situation was fluid.

The drives contain information on how to disarm U.S. and Russian
nuclear weapons, and nuclear weapons that could conceivably be made by
terrorist groups.

Employees at Los Alamos first noticed the drives were missing from a
locked suitcase stored in a vault on May 7, the Energy Department has
said. However, the employees did not inform their superiors, or the
Energy Department, until about three weeks later.

The Energy Department in turn informed the FBI.

Last Friday, the two hard drives were discovered underneath a copying
machine in a secure area of the Los Alamos facility. The FBI has said
the area was searched twice by its personnel since the beginning of
the month, and there was no way that the drives could have been there
all along.

It was not the first time that the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory has
been a subject of controversy.

Information believed to have been passed to U.S. intelligence by
Chinese intelligence in 1995 indicated that China knew some aspects of
secret U.S. techniques to miniaturize nuclear warheads as early as the
1980s.

U.S. officials suspected that the information had been leaked to the
Chinese, and narrowed down their search to scientists at the Las
Alamos weapons lab. Eventually, the FBI targeted Wen Ho Lee, a
Taiwan-born U.S. citizen and scientist with extensive contacts among
China's scientific community.

The FBI and Justice Department were unable to bring an espionage case
against Lee, however, though they charged him with improperly handling
classified information by downloading secret data from the Los Alamos
secure computer network to his office personal computer.

Critics of the probe alleged that Lee was singled out because of his
race, and that the information on miniaturized weapons was readily
available in scientific publications in the late 1980s.

Meanwhile, Lee is being held pending a federal trial in Albuquerque,
N.M.

The Los Alamos facility is overseen by the Energy Department, which
contracts out much of the work to the University of California.

Some GOP congressional leaders, and some Democrats, have criticized
Energy Secretary Bill Richardson over security at the Los Alamos lab.
After publicity surrounding the Lee case last year, Richardson
promised renewed efforts to stop security problems at Los Alamos.
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