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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."
How is it that reporters never get nailed for criminal trespass?
evil adrian
Seriously, though, doesn't it seem like there's just one security failure after another at these labs recently? I remember after the Wen Ho Lee "incident" they tightened things up to the point where the scientists were complaining, but apparently that was just a temporary thing.
It seems to me that installations which are especially key deserve much closer attention than they seem to get. Why isn't there a national security force staffed by professionals? They could guard non-military installations which have specific value, like nuclear plants, dams and national labs.
This is just another example of how nothing's changed since 9-11 except our willingness to give away our rights to those who consider themselves our masters. It's getting depressing to watch as we (the US) waste our time and attention on imaginary or, at best, overinflated threats while doing nothing to focus on our real problems.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
I visited there in 1999 to interview one of the astrophysicists. He took me to his lab where they had prototypes of the first gamma-ray burst detectors on display in the hall. When I remarked on how easy it was to drive into the base and asked how they keep people out of the interesting parts, he pointed down the hall. There was a floor-to-ceiling turnstile gate that you had to go through to reach a sensitive area. If your badge was not valid, the gate locked until the guards with dogs came to retrieve you. Security is a series of screens. He penetrated the first and flimsiest screen (and probably not really unnoticed). I'd be more impressed and worried if he got into (and out of) the building I saw that was surrounded by 10-foot-high fences capped with razor wire and watched by TV cameras every 50 feet or so.
Forgive me, but having grown up in Los Alamos, I could have told ya that. Sheesh. Kids in Los Alamos have been a pest for LANLites for years. The security isn't the best for many areas.
Additionally, a few years ago, a peace activitist walked into the lobby of the plutonium processing plant (iirc) to pray for peace. This was in a supposed Cross-This-Line-and-We-Shoot-to-Kill area. Funny that. He certainly didn't get riddled. Good thing he didn't carry, say, a whole lot of plastic explosives with the intent of being a suicide bomber, huh?
Finally, even during the Cold War, one of the guys that worked in a sensitive area wore a hat with a KGB symbol on it. He wore it walking in and out as a joke with his coworkers. They, the guards, never even inquired about it. While it was a joke, and the guards might have gotten in on it, a large part of what made it funny was that the guards never even batted an eye.
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
Secondly, he completely misrepresents what the Lab facilities are like. LANL is not one big, monolithic facility sitting on a single plot of land. It's got a main area, right in town (the "front gate" he refers to), and then lots of little facilities scattered all over the area. They are individually secured.
Getting in the "front gate" is no big deal because, you know, visitors are allowed in. (Unlike Sandia in Albuquerque, which is much harder to get into. But it's a single contiguous site situated within an Air Force base.)
The one facility that easily the most sensitive is the plutonium refinement facility--yes, LANL still has a reactor and refines and stores some plutonium. That area is surrounded by several staggered perimeter fences, with mines between them, dogs, guards, and "helicopter landing denial cables" strung all over the area, for good measure.
Then, if you've ever been in any of the facilities, you'll find that there are armed guards stationed at entraces to sensitive areas within buildings. When I was in high school, and went on a tour of LANL as part of its "High School Senior Science Day", a friend of mine innocently walked down a corridor to a vending machine and was immediately physically hoisted in the air and carried back to the rest of the group by two armed guards.
Furthermore, constantly patrolling the area of the Lab, including parts of town and neighboring areas that border the labs, are MPs in Jeeps with M-16s prominently displayed.
LANL is a sprawling facility built upon finger-like mesas and in deep canyons spread over a huge area. LANL-owned land is fenced off, but for these remote facilities--like those along NM 4--are individually secured. And not all facilities are equal. Some are not that sensitive. There are a lot of relatively insecure facilities at LANL, because they do a lot more research than just weapons research. I had numerous friends who did coop work there while they were in college, and only one of them actually needed a security clearance to do her work.
LANL is, more than Livermore, and certainly more than Sandia and Oak Ridge, a very "civilian-esque" lab. They do weapons design work there, and those areas, along with the plutonium facility, you can be sure are heavily secured.
Finally, this author was an idiot. He was lucky that he tried to approach a facility that apparently isn't that sensitive. He's lucky he didn't get shot. They will shoot you. And you can bet that there will be criminal charges filed against him for this. Imbecile.
Oh come on... what a disappointing article.
So a guy with a camera hops a fense in the middle of a radioactive desert, and snaps a few pics of some ominous-looking signs near said fence. Big friggin' deal. Just like those photos of Area 51. Who cares? Did he try to go any deeper? Has he asked or thought about why that section was so accessible?
I used to work in a large engine manufacturing plant, that was built during WWII. The sprawl was almost incomprhensible, and even more so when you realized there were caverns underneath the entire complex. Not much went on down there in the late 90's, and most of it was unlit.. nobody really had any business going thru there. Nonetheless, I wandered around one day, and found a room full of dusty forgotten file cabinets, filled with, among other things, the full and complete HR records of people who had worked for the comapny and since died, long before I was even born. Birthdates, positions held, SSNs, all that. Another cabinet had some old drawings, and who knows what else I could have found. Some would see this was a huge deal (I guess leaving all sorts of personnel records around IS pretty stupid), but come on!
One floor above, and barely 100 yards away was a maximum-security area for prototype testing and research. I only got to go back there with escorts ranking up with the plant manager.
Yeah, I probably would have gotten in deep doodoo if I'd been caught snooping in the caverns, but the real areas of interest were protected. I'm sure that goes on in Los Alamos and evereywhere else. At least I HOPE so!
~~~
"The slave thinks he is released from bondage, only to find a stronger set of chains" - NIN
Also notice that there is also an article about the LANL facility public tour on Wired today.
It does make you wonder why dictators have -- apparently -- security strong enough to stave off attacks by the most powerful army on the planet, yet the government of the most powerful army on the planet allows two-bit Wired.com writers to walk about and write alarmist pieces about the state of security in America and pretend that all they need to do to get a nuke is go down to the gift shop and say, "That one there. The one sitting by the squash-blossom necklace."
I mean, if Baghdad's purported subway system -- which was never used for subways but is instead used to hustle WMDs from one part of the city to the other, avoiding all the Corona-eyes-in-the-sky-satellites and all weapons inspectors -- is enough to stymie the *entire globe*, then shouldn't we be taking lessons from these assholes about how to secure our ops and nukes from a bunch of understaffed, underpaid terrorist cells who live eight-to-a-room in Ma McChesney's Motel Six off Insterstate 80?
One thing that should have been obvious to the guy writing the story.. is that the security around high-profile areas is intentionally lax looking. Basically on sensitive areas they have perimeter monitoring equipment, the entrance and exits to the locations have setups the weigh you, and won't let you in if there's a couple pound difference... and the supposed lack of guards isn't true. The second the perimeter is breached armed men will indeed come out and probably shoot you on the spot.
This is actually quite true. I've done work as a journalist (particularly as a student) and snuck into places just by acting as if I belonged there. I'm not so stupid as to venture into military labs though.. What I'm talking about is ordering a platter of beer and sneaking backstage with it at concerts to talk to bands without their pesky PR-managers present.. Much more innocent I'd say, but it proves a point.. and the beer loosend their lips very nicely! ;-)
Learn from the mistakes of others. There isn't enough time to make them all yourself.
The government is making this huge deal out of how security conscious they are right now. That being the case, they should be a bit more careful about random people walking around their supposedly secure facility.
No he didn't get inside any occupied building, but I'm sure there is a decent amount of stuff lying around down there that the everyday joe shouldn't have access to. Not to mention the damage a decent sized bomb could do, even nearby. Both ANFO (Here) and Nitroglycerine are synthesizable from relatively common ingredients. A quick moving truck with a hefty payload could do massive damage. If _I_ can think of this crap THEY should damn well be thinking about it.
Oh yea, they'll never prosecute this guy. Freedom of the Press, remember? It applies to more than just the right to print papers. If they tried to prosecute him, they'd just draw more bad press.
(Heres the link in case my HTML is screwy: http://www.tisi.go.th/notif_th/fulltext/t00_370.pd f)
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
That guy didn't even go near the important stuff I'm here in Santa Fe, about 20 minutes from LANL and you can recognize the important structures by the guard towers, barbed wire, and armed guards... plus there are cameras in all directions and even high level personnel have a tough time getting into them... this guy is trying to make a name for himself by doing absolutely nothing 'investigative'
I wouldn't be so sure about the state of security being what they imply in this article. You never know if the author's just trying to bait a trap for the CIA. For all we know, the reason this story is even out there is to try and trick some Osama-friendly spy into giving stealing something from this base a shot. :)
I mean, do you really think there aren't any guards on that base that have real weapons?
It was quite a few years ago, though.
My uncle worked there. We cruised through the security gate in his CJ with Cherry Bombs roaring and I didn't see a sole at the gate. Inside I was climbing around on the experiments peeping in the portholes with no ID tag or anything. There was one experiment that was studying plasma torroids for use (and I'm not making this up) as space propulsion or for car bumper coating. I was genuinely curious so I was asking questions about their setup and stuff. They just seemed a little annoyed and busy but not alarmed or anything.
My uncle was going through his toolbox, saying, "Here - want a wrench? How 'bout this cordless soldering iron?", and I'm like, "No thanks... don't want my only trip to Los Alamos to finish with theft of government property." Pretty cool experience, all-in-all. Glad I went before things changed.
- Hail to our fearless misleader! Fool speed ahead!
the contention that an injury can amount to a crime only when inflicted by intention is no provencial or transient notion
-Morissette v. United States, 342 U.S. 246,250
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Wrong.
You can walk across somebody's unfenced lawn.
But as you cross barriers, be they physical (fences) or symbolic (no trespassing signs) you have a far harder time defending your presence there regardless of your intent.
As the logical extreme for residences, if you're in my bedroom at 2 AM I don't give a damn what your "intent" is - at best you're going to spend the rest of the night in jail for "entry" (which is one step up from trespass). At worst you'll be dead and I'll have the affirmative defense of the local "make my day" law. (I don't have the right to kill you in cold blood, but the onus of burden is shifted onto the prosecution to prove that I could not have been in reasonable fear of my life to discover a stranger in my bedroom at 2AM.)
I haven't read the article to see what signs they have at Los Alamos, but at the nearby missile silos the fence is clearly marked both "no trespassing" and "use of lethal force authorized." You can't cross a sign like that and then claim that the lack of criminal intent means that everything is cool....
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Nobody looks like their picture. Ever see your driver's license?
How is walking in to a high security area any different than hacking computer systems? Why wasn't this guy put in jail for a few years waiting for a trial date?
- "That's just the kind of fuzzy-headed liberal thinking that leads to being eaten."
This same author also wrote an article about the shabby conditions at one of the unclassified Los Alamos sites. It's interesting that the physicist that he was interviewing did not complain about the working conditions. So why did the author make a big deal about it?
After reading both articles, my impression is that the author was expecting the entire Los Alamos complex to be some type of high tech super-secure facility, and when his expectations were not met he decided to write a couple articles blasting the place.
Quality journalism? I think not.
It doesn't seem unlikely that there is relatively easy access to secret facilities, nor that the government fails to use appropriate security measures. Consider past events, such as a russian diplomat's tapping of a state department conference room in 1999 that went undiscovered for some time.
Having worked at a DOE lab, and without disclosing details, let me say this article does not reflect the level of security in place in my experience.
In fact, I find computer people poking at DOE security pretty amusing. To use a couple of publicly known details: Take ID badges for example. Security guards at ID checking posts actually *touch* the ID badge to check that the badge is real and that the person matches the picture. I never saw this breached for an L-Level area (lowest level of security).
And, before Sept. 11, I have never had a private security person check that I am the person on my ID. After Sept. 11, I have only seen this done at airports.
Similarly, I have never seen a person without a proper badge in a L-level area. I have never seen a visitor without an escort close by (yes, including walking the visitor to the rest room and waiting outside).
All in all, I think Wired has fallen victim to the folks who are trying to smear UC -- a group that has been crying that the sky is falling and are trying in part to make up for the fact that they claimed that Wen Ho Lee was making the sky fall -- and turned out to be wrong.
To be fair to the US press, though, it should be mentioned that the US's peculiar geographical and cultural isolation, along with the simple fact that it's the dominant economy and, er, culture in the world, conspire to create milleau where information from outside the nation is not as relevant to people's lives as it is for other people elsewhere.
Now, I think it's a lot more relevant than most Americans do; but my point is that, even so, it's not as relevant to us as it is to most other people.
I am very internationalist in outlook, and I'm also skeptical by nature and was taught as a child not to trust any particular information source exclusively. I don't think the US media is as bad as many other people think it is, but it's definitely got its biases and its blind-spots, and I prefer to supplement what I know from non-US sources.
Americans are not xenophobic. I strongly believe that Americans are actually less xenophobic than many other nationalities are. We're actually a lot more friendly and open-minded than many people around the world think we are. I know this because I've known a considerable number of foreigners that have come to the US and have been surprised to find that their stereotypes were mostly false (but still partly true).
However, even if Americans aren't really that xenophpbic, they are quite willfully ignorant and indifferent. I'm frequently one of the few Americans that ever bother to ask my foreign friends about their home countries and their lives there and whatnot. Most people just seem to not care. Furthermore, I recall vividly one startling conversation I had with a very conservative friend. We were talking about foreign affairs and my general high level of knowledge about the world outside the US, and that I think that it's important that US leaders understand that we live in a globalized world and understand what that really means. And his reponse? "That's why I would never vote for you for President." My outward-looking visage was seen by him to be a bad thing.
That's especially interesting coming from a conservative--given that the Republicans are supposedly the foreign policy people and the Democracts are supposedly the domestic policy people. But, with this current administration, we can see just how "adept" at foreign policy conservatives can really be. Regardless of whether or not an Iraq war is justified, Bush's diplomacy has been a complete disaster.
You'd be amazed about how dull 90% (maybe more) of classified material is. Some things I got the impression were classified just to make them sonud interesting...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Many people here have commented that my story wasn't a big deal, because the area into which I went wasn't sufficiently top-secret. If I had walked out with, say, a wheelbarrow full of uranium, then they would have been impressed.
Well, in 1997, during a security training simulation, soldiers were able to do just that. In 2000, during a similar exercise, feaux bad guys "gain(ed) access to the reactor fuel... potentially causing a sizable nuclear detonation that would have taken out part of New Mexico and caused havoc downwind."
I'm a scared, out-of-shape lummox without any military training whatsoever, and with no motivation to do anything harmful. Yet I got into an area that I was assured could not be accessed by any outsider - an area that no one will even say officially what it's purpose is.
If I could do what I did - and these simulated attackers coudl make such spectacular inroads - what could a more determined adversary accomplish? That's the question my story asks.
Several Slashdotters said that TA-33 couldn't have been that important, if Bussolini and Alexander stored their allegedly fraudulently-purchased goods there, and if I was able to get in.
To that, one Slashdot reader replied, "I'm not comfortable assuming that the buildings he managed to get into were useless just based on the fact that he was able to access them. It seems like that sort of head-in-the-sand circular logic does not good security practices make."
I agree.
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