9 September 2004. Thanks to Justin Rood.
CQ HOMELAND SECURITY - TRANSPORTATION & INFRASTRUCTURE
Sept. 3, 2004 - 1:58 p.m.
By Justin Rood, CQ Staff
For the past five years, the Nevada state agency charged with monitoring the Department of Energy's Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage project has featured on its Web site details on how terrorists can mount potentially devastating attacks on waste shipments to the site.
The information includes a comparison of the various weapons that might be used for such an attack, the relative vulnerabilities of various waste shipping casks, and even a discussion of the weather conditions needed for optimal destruction.
Some have questioned why, three years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the page is still available from the state of Nevada - at least one state official thought it had already been removed.
The Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) have removed scores of documents from their Web sites since Sept. 11, explaining that they do not want to provide information that could aid a terrorist.
But advocates of open government - among them a crotchety 68-year-old Manhattan architect named John Young - say the public has a right to information in order to protect itself.
Young, an amateur anti-secrecy advocate, publishes the most security-sensitive material he can get his hands on - including the Nevada document - on his Web site, cryptome.org. He's not endangering the public, he says - he's trying to protect it.
"We try to put anything up that . . . the public might need to know for their own safety," Young said by phone last week. "We disagree with all this [information] being withdrawn, and the government's argument that the terrorists will use [it]."
The Department of Homeland Security, the FBI and others have asked Young to remove sensitive material from his site; he has always refused. That has put him at odds with some public officials.
"I think it's very, very bad for the country to have anyone putting together information that makes it easier for anyone that wants to injure Americans to do so," House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Christopher Cox, R-Calif., told ABC News last month in a story about Young's Web site.
The state of Nevada's Agency for Nuclear Projects, arguably, did exactly that two years before the Sept. 11 attacks with its warning of the terrorist threat to nuclear waste shipments.
The document's level of detail is novel for an unclassified report. It catalogs the specifications of anti-tank weaponry that might get the job done, finally settling on the French-made Milan portable missile system as optimal for the job.
With a two-kilometer range, an ability to fire up to three rockets in succession, and shells capable of piercing 40 inches of armor, the report said the Milan has more than enough power to pierce one or more of the nuclear fuel casks expected to be used to transport nuclear material through Nevada. Extensive diagrams of both the casks and the weaponry accompany the text.
The site says the attack should occur during a busy rush hour on a windy day to cause the most damage. That would force the evacuation of several hundred thousand people and contaminate billions of dollars' worth of hotels and casinos.
Alarm Bells
A few weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Peter Bell, a computer systems administrator from California and self-described independent researcher, was surprised to discover the document on the Nevada agency's Web site.
Bell thought the information was too specific and should be removed. He passed the page address along to a number of watchdog groups and journalists hoping to prompt action, but nothing changed.
So, three years later, Bell changed his tactics: He sent the address to Young at cryptome.org.
"Given that it's been world-readable for three years, there gets to be a point where you say, OK, fine, you might as well let the largest number of people know it's out there," Bell explained in a phone interview.
Out there, indeed: Bell found that several sites now carried links to the page, including an Arabic-language Web site, www.al-ansar.biz, which is suspected of having connections to al Qaeda.
Since Young posted the information from the Nevada Web page on Aug. 18, it has become one of the most popular documents, he said, attracting an average of 5,000 readers a day.
Sensitive Subject
Officially, the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects no longer posts the report. Links from the agency's home page to the report return a message saying the document is no longer available on the site "because of the sensitive nature of the subject matter." But a search of the agency's Web site using the keyword "terrorist" brings the page up easily, as does a traditional Google search.
That came as a surprise to one of the report's authors.
"I'll be honest with you, I'm surprised you can still access this," Robert Halstead, transportation adviser to the Nevada agency, said by phone Aug. 20, when asked about the document. Halstead identified himself as a co-author of the report.
Halstead said he and a colleague wrote the document in 1997 to highlight the dangers of transporting nuclear waste to the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage facility, located about 90 miles from Las Vegas. The NRC, he said, had resisted efforts to address the issue.
"Nobody wanted to entertain the idea that these shipments were really at risk," said Halstead. "We wrote this report with the intention of [providing] a detailed set of recommendations of what we think the NRC, the Department of Energy and the state of Nevada should do," he said.
Officials from the departments of Energy and Homeland Security declined to discuss the matter. The NRC did not return calls for comment.
Halstead also pointed out that the document comprised publicly available information. And he said he discussed posting the information with FBI officials "around 1999 or 2000," and they did not seemed concerned by it.
"They smiled at us and said, 'Gee, don't flatter yourself that anything you've thought about hasn't been thought about long ago,' " Halstead recalled.
Need to Know
Despite Young's zeal to publish the Nevada document - and many others of similar sensitivity - on his Web site, other openness advocates are more circumspect.
"On the surface, it looks like precisely the kind of information that the classification system was intended to protect," said government secrecy expert Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists. His group, he said, is interested in "limiting classification to a small, threat-driven set of information," not eliminating classification entirely, as Young apparently espouses.
"I think that cryptome.org has an anarchist sensibility," Aftergood said.
At an Aug. 24 hearing of the House Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations, Aftergood said it appears that "a decision has been tacitly made that the American public does not have a 'need to know' any information that some unaccountable official has determined is suitable 'for official use only.' This is unacceptable."
On this point, Aftergood and cryptome.org's Young concur. "It's security by obscurity," Young said. "Keeping people ignorant is supposed to protect them, when in fact it makes them vulnerable."
In the case of the Nevada report, the issue is murky: According to one official, the document is not supposed to be publicly available, yet it is. The information is considered potentially sensitive - but it has been available for five years, and may well already have been read by terrorists or others with nefarious intentions.
And then, of course, there are the politics of the situation.
Both Bell and Young suspect Nevada authorities have kept the document on their Web site to further the state's goal of deep-sixing the Yucca Mountain site as a feasible nuclear waste storage solution.
Halstead swears that is not the case. "We decided we should take it off precisely so we wouldn't be subject to the charge you're saying other people are making," Halstead said when told of the critics' charge. But he conceded, "I certainly understand why they're saying it."
Justin Rood can be reached via jrood@cq.com
Source: CQ Homeland Security
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