Data Stolen from Military and Nuclear Research Labs

By Eric on December 7, 2007

You can take “protecting Americans from identity theft” and “keeping us safe from terrorism” off of the short list of things that the Bush Administration does right. Some of our veterans learned that the hard way when a VA subcontractor lost a laptop containing veterans’ names, addresses, Social Security numbers, and insurance information last August. As a rational person, you might expect that since then, the government has learned to do a better job protecting personal information,

But no. The U.S. government did it again. And this time it wasn’t a subcontractor with butterfingers who lost the data. This time, someone stole personal information from two supposedly secure U.S. science facilities.

Hackers have succeeded in breaking into the computer systems of two of the U.S.’ most important science labs, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee and Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

In what a spokesperson for the Oak Ridge facility described as a “sophisticated cyber attack,” it appears that intruders accessed a database of visitors to the Tennessee lab between 1990 and 2004, which included their social security numbers and dates of birth. Three thousand researchers reportedly visit the lab each year, a who’s who of the science establishment in the U.S.

All the visitor data from 14 years at just one of the two attacked labs is gone. That’s forty-two thousand Social Security numbers out in the open. Forty-two thousand identities ready to be sold on the black market to the highest bidder. And this is from visitors, not even lab personnel. How could something like that be so insecure?

You also might be wondering what kind of experiments are being done at these labs. You probably assumed that, since they’re so insecure, the work being done there can’t be that important, right?

Wrong.

The ORNL is a multipurpose science lab, a site of technological expertise used in homeland security and military research, and also the site of one of the world’s fastest supercomputers. Los Alamos operates a similar multi-disciplinary approach, but specializes in nuclear weapons research, one of only two such sites doing such top-secret work in the U.S.

Oh, so the same people who just stole thousands of American (and maybe even security-cleared) identities also might have accessed our homeland security, military, and nuclear weapons research? HOLY FUCKING FUCK! Why are any of these computer systems even accessible from the internet in the first place? Our nuclear weapons research lab must have some sort of data safeguards in place, right?

Wrong again.

Los Alamos has a checkered security history, having suffered a sequence of embarrassing breaches in recent years. In August of this year, it was revealed that the lab had released sensitive nuclear research data by email, while in 2006 a drug dealer was allegedly found with a USB stick containing data on nuclear weapons tests.

“This appears to be a new low, even drug dealers can get classified information out of Los Alamos,” Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project On Government Oversight (POGO), said at the time. Two years earlier, the lab was accused of having lost hard disks

If a drug dealer can get his hands on nuclear weapons data, who’s to say al-Qaeda can’t? The one thing that the Bush Administration has consistently pledged to do is “keep American safe from terrorism.” Apparently, they can’t even do that right anymore.

Tags: identity theft, Los Alamos National Laboratory, nuclear weapons, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, terrorism

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