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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.
...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); }
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.
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 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"
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.
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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.
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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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
Scary...
Because the French are dumb enough to mistake it for a campaign poster and vote for him...
Or so it would seem from their recent behaviour regarding Saddam.
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.
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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