The US Department of Energy (DOE) oversees the nuclear weapons program. The National Nuclear Security administration in albuquerque, New Mexico keeps on their computer system files containing information about workers throughout the agency's nuclear weapons complex.
Due to the extreme sensitivity of the information, many measures are taken to protect the system from being accessed by hackers. The DOE spends $140 million a year on cyber security.
Nevertheless, Gregory H. Friedman, the DOE's inspector general, confesses that the computer system is vulnerable. "Significant weaknesses continue to exist."
Last September, a hacker penetrated a number of security safeguards and managed to access the system.
The incident was not reported to senior officials until now. Officials reported the story to a congressional hearing on Friday.
The Energy and Commerce oversight and investigations subcommittee learned about it late Thursday, on the eve of its hearing on DOE cyber security, said Rep. Edward Whitfield, R-Ky., chairman of the panel.
NNSa administrator Linton F. Brooks admitted that he was aware of the security break late last September. Brooks did not inform Energy Secretary Samuel W. Bodman about it. Moreover, none of the victims was notified.
Tom Pyke, the DOE official charged with cyber security, said he learned of the incident a few days ago.
Brooks said the file contained names, Social Security numbers, birthdates, security clearances status and codes showing where the employees worked.
Brooks said he assumed the DOE's counterintelligence office would have briefed either Bodman or Deputy Energy Secretary Clay
"That's hogwash, you report directly to the secretary. . . . You had a major breach of your own security, and yet you didn't inform the secretary," Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, replied to Brooks.
Curiously enough, this type of confusion is usual at the DOE. a few years ago, in the wake of a possible spy scandal, the Director of Los alamos, a DOE laboratory of New Mexico, declared that he was unaware of his authority over certain sectors of his laboratory.
Many physicists believe that the DOE has the right acronym but the wrong name. Department of Entropy may be more appropriate. (Entropy is a concept close to disorder.)
DOE officials did not say whether the classified network that contains nuclear weapons designs may have been hacked also.
The DOE has been the US agency most battered by scandals over many decades. It is a DOE expert who told Tenet that the now infamous Iraqi aluminium Tubes were designed for a Uranium Enrichment facility. actually, the tubes had the wrong dimensions for such purpose. However, they matched perfectly the size of a rocket system used by several western armies, including the US.
These tubes and the forged Niger documents were used by the US administration to justify a pre-emptive war against Iraq.
On March 14, 2003, Rockefeller formally asked Robert Mueller, the FBI director, to investigate the forged documents concerning the attempt by the Iraqis to buy uranium from Niger. These documents were presented as proof that Iraq was rebuilding a covert nuclear program. The U.S. government used them to justify a pre-emptive war against Iraq.
"There is a possibility that the fabrication of these documents may be part of a larger deception campaign aimed at manipulating public opinion and foreign policy regarding Iraq," Rockefeller wrote to Mueller.
Strange things are going on in the DOE laboratory of New Mexico. The vacuum pumps of the former Libyan nuclear program were manufactured by a German company: Pfeiffer Vacuum. But according to the company, these vacuum pumps were sent to the U.S. nuclear weapons research facility in Los alamos, New Mexico. How did they find their way to the nuclear mafia?
If Bush wishes to make the world safe from nuclear terrorism, he may have to consider a change of strategy. Instead of looking for WMD's (renamed Weapons of Massive Disappearance) in Iraq, he should investigate his own laboratories and agencies.