Security Policy Poses a Risk, Report Says

Tightened security and the threat of criminal prosecution for minor errors is becoming a bigger threat to national security than the potential loss of secrets, according to former Sen. Howard H. Baker (R-Tenn.) and former Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.)

The former legislators, who were appointed last June by Energy Secretary Bill Richardson to study the misplacement of two computer hard drives containing nuclear secrets at New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Laboratory, have recommended that Richardson cancel the policy of “zero tolerance” for security violations announced last year in the wake of allegations of spying at the lab.

In a report to be released today, Baker and Hamilton wrote, “Once issues of management oversight give way to criminal investigation, and lab employees fear that committing a security error may expose them not just to management discipline but to prosecution and imprisonment, any hope that individuals will volunteer information that could reflect security lapses is annihilated.”

Baker and Hamilton did not have access to the current FBI investigation into last spring’s disappearance of the hard drives, and their report contains no new information about who might have been responsible or what might have happened to the drives during the time they were missing.

The report said the episode has had “a highly negative effect on the ability of [Los Alamos] and the other national laboratories to continue to do their work, while attracting and maintaining the talented personnel who are the lifeblood of the cutting-edge work of the laboratory.”

“Offer an amnesty, with a reasonable [administrative] punishment, if you want the truth about the hard drives,” one employee was quoted in the report as saying. Other lab workers said that “you are not going to restore morale unless the FBI ends its investigation,” according to a participant in the meetings.

The strongest language of the Baker-Hamilton report, however, is directed toward the apparent harm they believe is being caused by the tighter security rules imposed by officials in Washington. “A year ago [oversight officials] were partners; now they are policemen,” they reported being told.