NUKE LAB "SECRETS" = NOT-SO-SECRET?

Why did classified Los Alamos e-mail go out over an insecure system? Lab officials are blaming the government's circlicued secrecy regulations.

Jim Danneskiold, a lab spokesman, told the New York Times that "none of the messages represented a threat to national security and that none involved the transfer of computer data from the lab's classified network to an unclassified network.

"These e-mails mostly are connected to the complexities of classification rules," he said. Under the rules, several pieces of unclassified information can be considered classified if they are combined together. "An unclassified statement made in context becomes classified."

That jives with what Steven Aftergood, who heads up the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy, tells me.

"The classification of 'compilations' of unclassified information is a particularly annoying feature of classification policy, but a well established one."

From an executive order on classification:

(e) Compilations of items of information that are individually unclassified may be classified if the compiled information reveals an additional association or relationship that: (1) meets the standards for classification under this order; and (2) is not otherwise revealed in the individual items of information. As used in this order, "compilation" means an aggregation of pre-existing unclassified items of information.

Aftergood also warned lab onlookers not to get bent out of shape about a disk or an e-mail "simply because somebody blessed them as 'classified.' In other words, I wonder about the actual sensitivity of much of this stuff."

I could be wrong but I suspect that in most cases the information would be useless to any new would-be proliferator, who would be unable to understand and exploit the particular coded data. And it would also probably be useless to an existing nuclear weapons state, which would hardly be likely to abandon its own tested design for a "sophisticated" US model.

THERE'S MORE: Defense Tech pal Adam Rankin picks up two interesting Los Alamos tidbits in today's Albuquerque Journal.

- 11 scientists had authorization to access the missing disks which sparked this current controversy. But hundreds more had the necessary security clearance, referred to as "Q" clearance, to be in the general area of the disks.

- Word is that those disks were created for a meeting with British scientists. And a key member of Congress -- Rep. James Greenwood (R-PA), whose chaired numerous investigations into Los Alamos -- wants to know whether British officials might have played a role in the disappearance of two classified computer data storage devices from Los Alamos National Laboratory.