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Los Alamos Security Infiltrated By Reporter
morcheeba writes "Wired reported Noah Shachtman gives a first-hand account of his entry into a high-security area at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Yes, there are pictures. It seems that the birthplace of the atom bomb is being guarded by string, backed up by guards with empty holsters. There's a little more info on Noah's Defense Tech website."
It's the security you don't see. Unless he had a geiger counter and an anthrax vaccination I dont think anyone would want to risk wandering around Los Alamos. Just the threat of spending the rest of my life with a third arm is enough to keep me away. I mean think about it, he states they hauled away 9 tons of radioactive soil from where he was wandering around, think they got all of it? Plus theres the whole matter of what made the soil radioactive in the first place lying around somewhere. Hope he didn't bring home any souviners.
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"We didn't fence all 43 square miles," said lab spokeswoman Nancy Ambrosiano. "But if you're near an area that matters, you can't get in."
If you read the article, it turns out this boob managed to infiltrate a "Top-Secret" storage shed for illicit camping gear. There are probably thousands of facilities around the country that house classified facilities that you could still walk into the lobby of and claim to have infiltrated. You can drive onto many military bases around the country, untill you get to the defenses that protect anything important. Shachtman is trully a l33t j00rnul15t.
A literature prof once told me never to get in a fight with a journalist: they control the media and they tend to stick together.
I don't think he'll see jailtime. At most he will get a suspended sentence. Otherwise, other journalist will raise hell.
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It's hard to make it stick, for one, especially if they find evidence of some sort of mismanagement.
For the second, do you know how much publicity would come of trying to prosecute a reporter for reporting the truth? This story will fade away into the background in a day or two if they just ignore it, or release a noncommittal statement. A few heads will quietly roll among the security staff and that will be it.
If they try to prosecute it becomes a story of how an incompetent government is incapable of protecting any nation secrets while AT THE SAME TIME trying to impinge on the Freedom of the Press clause in the Bill of Rights.
The Bill of Rights will never get amended because the freaks on the Left would rather die than see freedom of speech/assembly/the press impinged upon, and the freaks on the Right would rather die than see the Right to Bear Arms/Freedom of Religion touched.
On top of all this, this country's leaders are cravenly attached to opinion polls, and opnion polls are VERY strongly influenced by the press, which means that ANY government official is going to be VERY careful before trying to stick it to a member of the press.
Heh. Not exactly the short answer.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Walking across someone's lawn is not criminal. Reporters trespass on government property in order to cause embarrassment; and their documentation and disclosure of their actions proves this.
We would be in a world of shit if journalists were prevented from embarrassing our government.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
As long as you *look* like you belong there, getting in isn't a problem.
This is actually true. I've spent some time working in secure military facilities in the UK, and on my first few days I wondered around looking lost. I was regularly challenged, and had to show my badge (which I was wearing in a visible location anyway). In places like this you are required to challenge anyone who is not displaying their pass openly, and can by in trouble if you fail to do so.
A few weeks later I went for to the canteen in another part of the site, then to the personnel office, in another part of the site, then to a meeting in a third part of the site. It was a hot day and so I didn't wear my jacket. It was only when I returned to my desk that I saw my security pass, still attached to my jacket.
DISCLAIMER: To get onto that particular site you would have to either climb a 10 foot razor wire fence, or bluff your way past armed guards, but once you were in then you could wander about fairly freely. I didn't go anywhere particularly sensitive without my pass, but I walked past a number of security personnel, and was in ear-shot of a number of people talking about classified projects without being challenged.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Nah, they might get hit with a lawsuit by the trespasser claiming mental and psychological scarring from having broken in and seeing those poor wretched dead people just left out there all alone to rot, those uncaring murdering BASTARDS!
Distraction definitely would be an excellent way to handle security. But you would make a big show about the base, and yet the "dullville" warehouse would still have high security, just not as obvious. This would be a "just in case" measure. In case someone accidentally found out about the warehouse.
The art of security is not to completely prevent someone from seeing something. That's impossible. Rather, you want to slow them down. ie. encryption that takes 100s of years. A safe that would take a long time to burn through or test all the combinations (thick walls, long combination). The goal is to slow them down, not completely stop them. Since stopping them is near impossible. (Unless you just kill them.)
~ kjrose
Fact #1: 80% of all militay base property is landscaping and wildlife areas. The other 10% is protected to the level of needed security.
Fact #2: Without having insider knowledge of where on a military installation sensitive material is located you don't have a chance of hell of finding it wandering around - Much less penetrating any real security unimpeded.
Fact #3: Security doen't mean 100% access control. It merely means protecting assets to the degree needed to make it tough for the bad guys.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
I am an uncleared employee of LANL and I can assure you that security is top notch. I have never been allowed near any place that I am not cleared to be in. There are old buildings all over the lab (many of them unused) and NONE
of them used for anything interesting.
Regardless of the reporter's picture of the guard without the gun, the gaurds DO ave guns...lots of them. I've looked in my rearview mirror many times to find a Hummer with a roof mounted M-60 behind me. Any other labbies have something to add?
I've been there. The building I was in needed an id card and a plam scan to get past the armed guard and the two barbwire fences, and the heavy full height turnstile. Then once inside, I need to go to a second guard to check out a temperary badge to get into a room that had secret stuff. That room (a machine room) had an armed guard 24/7.
Not sure which Los Alamos he broke into...
I seem to recall something about tours of the site recently. I bet the area he got into is only classified top secret because somebody would have to get off their duff to unclassify it. And since it was probably classfied from the highest levels, some clerk couldn't do it.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
This does require at least one of your little band of terrorists to have valid security clearence (which requires about 2 months of background checks) and for them all to look the same, since the pass has a photo on it.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
> He was foolish because he could have gotten himself shot, and he will probably find himself being prosecuted for it. He was obnoxiously foolish because he didn't prove anything of any real consequence. It was a stunt. That's bad journalism. It's probably more self-aggrandizement than anything else.
Gaining unauthorized access to a Top Secret nuclear weapons facility is not "of any real consequence"? Perhaps he should have tried to remove some material from that shack he was in, that would make you happy, that would be something of consequence?
I'd call it more than a stunt, I'd call it an ad-hoc security audit - and the lab failed badly.
if a journalist broke into a government computer systen or network to show how easy it was and the reported it he'd be labeled a "terrorist" and prosecuted for sure.
Those were some pretty lame pics of Los Alamos. I mean come on, I could take a piece of string and a no trespassing sign and head to the desert and then tell the world that I infiltrated the base. A picture of a shed with a fence around it? Come on, I could find one of this with 5 blocks of my apartment. All I would have to do is put the number 33 on it and the rest of the world would probably never know. I didnt see anything credible that said "los alamos" on it that couldnt easily have been forged. For all we may know, this guy is faking it.
Arrests are often because they refuse to reveal their sources in court.
This one actually is bad. Journalism is about getting the truth, and the truth is often stifled by threats to the people who have it. By keeping sources secret, the journalists help the truth to get out while protecting those involved.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
Ok... let's say I'm a reporter. I get a call from a Son-of-Sam-like serial killer or a drug kingpin. Since many serial killers do it to make headlines, he wants an interview. Being a reporter and also wanting to make headlines, I accept. The cops read the interview and want to know everything about the guy. I refuse to tell them.
Please explain to me how I am not both legally and morally responsible for my actions? These people will go off and kill in the future and I did nothing to stop them.
There's a difference between reporting something that's politically sensitive and being irresponsible. When Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson advocated strong freedom of the press over 200 years ago, they had the former in mind. Reporters are supposed to use the truth to enlighten and protect people. Unfortunately, many reporters aren't after the truth these days; they're after the big stories and the prestige they bring. This is absolutely NOT in the spirit of the law.
I think that the theory is that if you turn in your sources, then no future serial killer would ever trust a reporter again. Society is better served by letting this serial killer walk away with only his "on the record" possibly giving away his identity; hopefully the next one will also talk to a reporter but be stupid enough to give up their home address, telephone number, etc.
I'm not saying that I think the idea is good or bad, but that's my understanding of the proponents' position.
For a different example, suppose a person visited a prostitute who had a few things to say about a local politician's drug habit. The public might want to know that their governor is a heroin addict, but unless that person is reasonably sure that their identity is safe, they probably won't be too eager to tell the world that they were hanging out with hookers.
I think that the "sanctity of sources" doctrine is meant to cover the latter example more than the "unnamed serial killer" possibility.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Here is a page describing LANL, and includes a map. Notice the scale of the map and how huge an area LANL covers. Notice that TA-33 is one of the most remote facilities.
And here is a pdf in two parts (part one and part two) that describes every tech area, and includes maps. The description and map of TA-33 is in part one.
Looking at the detail of the area of TA-33 near Highway 4 (because there's a whole bunch of TA-33 away from the highway!), I see dozens of buildings. Clearly, the writer couldn't have approached either of the two buildings that are designated as being in the "hazard category" because they are well within the perimeter of TA-33 and along the main roadway that serves the cluster of buildings at that northern portion of TA-33. He tries to make it sound as if the whole of TA-33--a huge area covering a range of terrain--is or should be guarded with high-level perimeter security and that, once he crossed the perimeter into TA-33, he was "in". But this is just silly. Buildings within technical areas have their own security, and the most senstitive buildings have the most intense security. He walked up to a "silver building" that was near the roadway. Big deal! That means nothing.
You and all the other people here who don't know anything about LANL are being misled by this writer who is preying upon your preconceived ideas about what such an installation is like. LANL is not like what most people imagine. There are lower and higher level security areas. There are areas that are essentially completely insecure. It covers a huge amount of territory, in some cases seemingly intermingled with the town.
I have nothing but contempt for this writer because he took a stupid risk for a trivial payoff. If he believed that the labs were insecure in this way, then he should have researched what the most sensitive buildings were, and attempted to enter them. As it is, his account reads like someone who was driving around, saw that the fence ended, and decided to snoop in the name of journalism. Then, afterwards, he contacted some "sources" and used their claim that TA-33 involved "black-op" stuff to make it seem like the one little portion of it he tresspassed upon was itself important.
He doesn't provide a map, doesn't provide a description of TA-33, doesn't tell you how much area TA-33 covers, doesn't tell you how many different buildings there are. He provides no context from which the ignorant reader can evaluate his claims of discovering a serious security lapse. He does, however, through insinuation and omission, strongly imply that he's done something extraordinary. But he hasn't.
Breaking the law in this manner should be punished regardless. Nevertheless, I'd be willing to applaud his efforts and courage if he was actually doing something worthwhile and noble. Instead, he's grandstanding and being stupid about it, to boot. He deserves to be thrown in jail just for being such a pathetic example of a journalist.