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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."
Sneaking onto the grounds on LANL is like saying its a feat to sneak across the US-Mexico border.
How is it that reporters never get nailed for criminal trespass?
evil adrian
I wonder if he saw Gordon Freeman by any chance while he was there?
There is absolutely nothing to prevent anyone from just walking in and, *sniffle*, exploring and *wheeze*, doing whatever they *cough, hack, choke*, gawddamn, I feel like crap today. Better go have a lie down before I write the rest of this article. *glurgle*
Sadam Hussein has quit Iraq and is now providing his services to the US arms establishment as a consultant specializing in making defense laboratories bloody difficult to find.
All we need is a bunch of UN arms inspectors touring the US looking for nukes in the presidential palaces and such security issues will soon be fixed!
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
Apparently, security at Los Alamos is run by the same folks who allowed the knife-weilding lunatic break into Prime Minister Chretien's home and threaten his wife for half an hour.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
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.
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.
Check out my life
...was when he said that the area he had gotten into was a big top-secret area "according to lab sources".
It turns out that my basement is actually a top-secret area for Los Alamos National Labs too. My sources from the lab told me so.
Anybody can come over and inspect the US weapons of mass destruction. We'll leave the light on for you, just let yourself in. If you want to phone in a report, there's a few pay phones over there.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Hell the Chinese and Russians already know this stuff, and Bin Laden was trained by the US.
Its the FRENCH that this stuff is being protected from.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
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?
"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.
green peace was doing this stuff in france recently. one on the stunts included inflating a gigantic Homer Simpson figure on the premises of the nuclear power plant. is it funny or scary?
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
So this guy got onto the grounds of the lab, and was able to access a decrepid old shack. I'll bet money he couldn't have gotten anywhere where there was top-secret research or information.
So he made it onto the grounds and into an abandoned buiilding. They have problems with coyotes doing the same thing. Most of the grounds are not guarded or even fenced in. Its parameter is some 40 miles. There are even trailer houses in the unsecure areas, for civilian paperwork and such, sometimes known are the Leper Colony. The secure parts are, however, quite secure. Surveillance, armed guards and razor wire galore. This area is still not very interesting. The good stuff is wrapped in a couple more layers. Even someone with Q clearance cannot take a recording device or cell phone in there.
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"
...President Bush made an announcement that the staff at Wired were assisting terrorists in Iraq
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.
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
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.
I remember an anecdote (in Richard Feynman's Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, I think) that Los Alamos's security was pretty lax even during the Manhattan Project. Apparently there were a few places in the gate where local Indians were occasionally let through by the scientists and workers to watch movies and hang out.
If I'm not mistaken, Los Alamos is also where Feynman got his reputation for lockpicking, since he taught himself how to break into the safes where classified documents were stored and prove to the higher-ups that security wasn't as tight as they'd wanted to believe.
:wq
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.
Any security system is vulnerable. The best place to store sensitive documentation is in a pile of corporate memos about new document formatting guidelines, not in the safe. A thief will burn through the safe lock, and steal the contents and ignore the piles of junk on your desk, because only a fool would leave valuable things out when they had such an expensive safe. Likewise, the best way to protect national security assets is to build a really big base, surround it with armed guards, leak stories about alien tech being developed there and make it the centre of attention, while you do all you real research in an unmarked warehouse in Dullsville.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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'
It is, didn't you know that terrorists are being helped by aliens? It was the Al Quaeda sympathising aliens that shot down challenger with their anti-freedom-ray! The TA-33 is part of a long-term US government strategy to fight back against this new menace...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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?
Wow, my cubicle is better guarded then this place. I'd like to see him get through my wall of empty coke cans!
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...
It seems that the birthplace of the atom bomb is being guarded by string ...
... but it was *really good* string. Finest fiber ... the best money can buy. $45 a roll on the GSA schedule (MILSPEC costs bucks, ya know) ...
Yes
The little guy just ain't getting it, is he?
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!
One time on tv about half an hour before a broadcast advertising for the news. They said 'find out about a secret nuclear reactor, right in our own city!'
Then another commercial in the next break comes on. 'Watch as we show you a nuclear reactor, closer to your home than you probably think!' And it showed a picture of the nuclear engineering building at the local university. I burst into laughter. That reactor was hardly 'secret', it is a well advertised reactor, a very puny one. I toured it about 4 years ago....
Then the final commercial.... 'we'll show you our hidden camera investigation where our undercover reporter infiltrates security and gets into the reactor room!' And it showed a picture of something I could understand a layman mistaking for the reactor, but it certainly was not the reactor.
During the broadcast they made a big point of how they were able to see labs and classrooms, and then unveiled their 'killer' footage. The camera man, obviously excited, walks all around for a long time taking every possible shot he can of what *he* thought was a reactor, but it was just a cooling device not related to the reactor at all. About five minutes after the broadcast, they announce a correction, that they had learned that it wasn't a reactor, and that the place housing the reactor wasn't accessible, but still the thought this stuff was dangerous in the hands of terrorists because it said 'high voltage...'
The news always botches this stuff up. How many times have you seen news reports on a technology you are intimately familiar with and laughed your ass off at the inaccuracies?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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.
but a hell of a lot of crates....
good thing he brought a handy crowbar.....
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
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.
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.
Layers. Sure, at most US military bases, you can probably sneak over the fence and walk around. Maybe even sneak into a warehouse or other empty building.
One person walking around and getting into an office building is almost certainly no problem (depending on the alert level).
But to get to the 'good stuff' you have to go through an incredible number of steps. And there is *no way* to access anything really sensitive without quite a few people knowing and challenging you.
This is much ado about nothing.
Don't get me wrong. There is plenty to criticize about security at Los Alamos. But the article is akin to bragging that you got into the "johnny on the spot" outhouse in an used section under construction on the outskirts of a military base.
I will admit that they ought to be more secure about letting people *out* of facilities though. I used to work late and the guards left at 6 and there was only a unidirectional turnstile "guarding" the place. While there were other measures to retain building security, I could have walked out with lots of stuff had I wanted to. If I wanted to get in at night I'd just call the Pro Force and they'd let me into the building, no questions asked, so long as I had a security badge.
However lets also be honest. Most of the stuff labelled "top secret" really isn't terribly significant. The stuff that is important has a *lot* more security on it. For instance our really important servers and stuff were in sealed rooms and then inside rather large safes in those rooms. And only a few people had the passwords. We had all sorts of restrictions for cable length to avoid hacking via E&M signals. We had pretty amazing encryption devices. And the really important areas had amazing security. The weakest link, as always, tends to be the employees and not these sorts of things.
There are problems, but what this story discusses aren't they.
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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