Winter Patriot brings us an update to that story from Time:
"New details obtained by TIME offer an even more disturbing picture of security at the nation's nuclear inner sanctum than the one outlined last year in a no-nonsense investigation by the Department's Inspector General. In fact, according to government documents, the woman who made off with the weapons designs was herself engaged in chronic illegal drug use and other serious security breaches that have never been made public. Documents also show that the DOE is investigating separate drug use by at least 35 other lab workers who received security clearances around the same time.apparently she had a high-speed scanner in her trailer on which she would work late at night. Her job was to scan paper documents into digital formats - so she stole digital documents so that she could scan paper documents at home. or something. Thanks, Time, for clarifying all of that.
Investigators don't believe powers hostile to the U.S. have exploited this latest round of security lapses, although they cannot be certain. But clearly, those with access to the nation's nuclear secrets would be priority targets of foreign intelligence services, and problems such as drug-abuse could make them vulnerable to manipulation.
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Jessica Quintana, the woman who lived in the trailer, went to work as an archivist at Los Alamos at age 18, right out of high school. Accounts seen by TIME of the investigation that followed her arrest reveal that even before taking the job, she "self-reported acts of drug and alcohol abuse" in high school. By her own admission, she was using drugs (marijuana) and drinking while under age even during the period of her security screening. But after promising to stop taking drugs (although not alcohol), and signing a written pledge to submit to drug-testing, she received a clearance to handle some of America's most sensitive secrets. Despite the pledge, follow-up drug-tests were "never performed," a government document says, even as Quintana proceeded to commit multiple security violations with little supervision from the lab's security administrators.
It was only after several years on the job that she was caught with bomb designs in her trailer and fired. But the investigation reveals that Quintana had taken her cell phone into a vault filled with secret documents where she worked — another major security violation. She also had access to a high-speed classified printer, even though such access was "not required by her job," and used the device to run off hundreds of copies of classified documents that she also brought home...
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Quintana's motive for breaching the rules appears to have been benign: Falling behind on her work scanning paper copies of nuclear-weapons designs into a digital format, she would save highly-classified documents onto a "thumb drive" and then take the material home to work on after hours, she has said. The practice of inserting thumb drives was specifically forbidden by then DOE secretary Bill Richardson in 1999, but was apparently not uncommon at Los Alamos."
Regardless, the important part of Sibel's case is that people at the State Dept were being bribed by Perle and co and were 'placing' people in the nuclear labs with the express intent of stealing nuclear secrets for criminal purposes (as I document here).
I wonder when Time will put Sibel on the front cover?
3 comments:
Time will put Sibel on the cover when they decide to be more dedicated to news and less beholden to people who profit from war. It's a damned shame. I had a subscription in the 1980s and Time was relatively independent. Now, it's just a monument of prior restraint and poor investments.
U - I suspect "never" - altho maybe they will when we've got sibel a ticker parade in nyc
I don't think Time will put her on the cover until the truth about 9/11 is mainstream, common knowledge.
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