[Dataloss] Data on nuclear agency workers hacked: lawmaker

[Richard Forno]

Data on nuclear agency workers hacked: lawmaker
Fri Jun 9, 2006 7:57 PM ET
http://tinyurl.com/pvtre

By Chris Baltimore

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - 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 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.

Earlier this week the Pentagon revealed that personal information on about
2.2 million active-duty, National Guard and Reserve troops was stolen last
month from a government employee's house.

That comes on top of the theft of data on 26.5 million U.S. military
veterans, the Department of Veterans Affairs has said.

A spokesman for Energy Secretary Sam Bodman declined comment on the call for
Brooks' resignation but said the secretary was "deeply disturbed about the
way this was handled internally" and would make it a priority to notify
workers about the lapse.

The "vast majority" of those workers were contractors, not direct government
employees, said the spokesman Craig Stevens.

According to Barton, the NNSA chief knew about the incident soon after it
happened in September but did not inform Energy Department officials,
including Bodman, until Wednesday.

"I don't see how you could meet with (Bodman) every day the last seven or
eight months and not inform him," Barton said.

He said Brooks cited "bureaucratic confusion" to explain the reporting
lapse.

"It appears that each side of that organization assumed that the other side
had made the appropriate notification," Brooks told the House energy panel's
oversight and investigations subcommittee, according to a record provided by
Barton's office.

"Just as the secretary just learned about this week, I learned this week
that the secretary didn't know," Brooks said. "There are a number of us who
in hindsight should have done things differently on informing."

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