Data on Nuclear Agency Workers Hacked: Lawmaker

Published on Saturday, June 10, 2006 by Reuters

Data on Nuclear Agency Workers Hacked: Lawmaker
by Chris Baltimore


A computer hacker got into the U.S. agency that guards the country's nuclear weapons stockpile and stole the personal records of at least 1,500 employees and contractors, a senior U.S. lawmaker said on Friday.

The target of the hacker, the National Nuclear Safety Administration, is the latest agency to reveal that sensitive private information about government workers was stolen.

The incident happened last September but top Energy Department officials were not told about it until this week, prompting the chairman of the House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee to demand the resignation of the head of the NNSA.

An NNSA spokesman was not available for comment.

The NNSA is a semi-autonomous arm of the Energy Department and also guards some of the U.S. military's nuclear secrets and responds to global nuclear and radiological emergencies.

Committee chairman Rep. Joe Barton (news, bio, voting record) said NNSA Administrator Linton Brooks should be "removed from your office as expeditiously as possible" because he did not quickly notify senior Energy Department officials of the breach.

"And I mean like 5 o'clock this afternoon if it's possible," Barton, a Texas Republican, said in a statement.


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PLEASE rate up the stars.

data.......... shame on them.

Who might want to identify people who work in such a program, and get as much personal information as possible on them and on others who've served in classified military and intelligence programs?

What a nightmare for counter-intelligence, agency security, and counter-terrorism. This is probably more dangerous than all those trojans and backdoors that have been placed in the IT backbone by people working for NSA and CIA private contractors.

And, we're supposed to believe that we're more secure than ever thanks to the Bush Administration.