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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
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
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?
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.
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!
Nobody looks like their picture. Ever see your driver's license?
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.
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...
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