Security regulations for the handling of classified technologies have been repeatedly violated at three of the country's most important laboratories. That's the conclusion of the Energy Department's Inspector General, who today issued a report detailing security woes at Los Alamos, Sandia, and Oak Ridge National Laboratories.
On multiple occasions, the Inspector General found, foreign nationals were working on secret research programs -- even though they have been specifically forbidden from doing so, since the Wen Ho Lee scandal. Officials at Sandia didn't bother to go through the Department-required classification and counterintelligence reviews on key research and development deals. And there was no indication that the labs matched their employment rolls against State and Treasury Department bad guy lists.
"We did not detect any direct evidence of a security compromise," the IG's report says. But "any breakdown in the vigorous application of required safeguards of lack of a clear policy in this arena represents a potential threat to our nation's security."
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