A Setup for a Security Nightmare

Lessons learned at the Department of Energy can be applied to the corporate world.

By Dan Verton

March 3, 2003 12:00 PM ET

Recommended

Computerworld - A new book by Notra Trulock, former director of intelligence at the U.S. Department of Energy, details how apathy and politics can infect the decision-making of senior managers and create a security nightmare for frontline administrators.
Code Name Kindred Spirit (Encounter Books, 2003) takes readers inside the Chinese nuclear espionage scandal that occurred between 1995 and 2001 at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and led to the DOE's investigation of nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee. Trulock also sheds new light on how senior DOE management contributed to the appalling state of computer and enterprise security that contributed to the possible disclosure of the U.S.'s most sensitive nuclear secrets.
In an interview with Computerworld, Trulock offered insight into how mismanagement of security issues at the highest levels of an organization can have devastating results.

In your book, you wrote about many management and leadership shortcomings at the DOE, and especially how those shortcomings had a debilitating effect on enterprise security. Can you expand on a few examples that might offer some sober lessons for large corporations? Most importantly, I think, security was sharply devalued by the Energy Department and senior lab managers during the 1990s. It is common knowledge that budgets were run down and both manpower and training were sharply cut back. By far the worst offense, however, was the corruption and manipulation of security standards and measures of performance imposed by these officials.

Time and again, senior managers fudged or simply suppressed the results of security exercises, evaluations and self-assessments. More than once, senior lab managers were caught red-handed pressuring security officials to revise upward poor marks on security exercises. In other cases, the outcomes of such exercises were rigged to conceal vulnerabilities. Inevitably, senior management officials also had to suppress and silence those security officers unwilling to go along with the coverups.

You also wrote that you "witnessed many incidents in which CI [counterintelligence] officers were asked to report on the same people who wrote their performance appraisals, granted raises and approved budgets." What lessons and suggestions should come out of this for large corporate security programs that might be wrestling with finding the right management structure? I don't know whether the problems I witnessed are unique to the national labs. As counterintelligence was de-emphasized [along with security] at the labs in the 1990s, CI units were pushed further down the lab structure to the point that multiple layers of management existed between CI officers and the lab director. Consequently, CI [and security] problems rarely were brought to

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