Word: sandia
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...ends - at least until appeals - Shawn Carpenter's quest for justice. Carpenter, whose story was first written about in TIME magazine in August 2005, was a network security analyst working at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque when he discovered that the lab's network was coming under a methodical series of attacks emanating from Chinese IP addresses. When the Navy veteran found out that dozens of Army bases and defense contractors around the country had been suffering identical Trojan horse attacks on their secure networks, he went to his bosses to present the evidence he had collected...
...What followed was an object lesson in bureaucratic torpor. Wary of the gray legal area involved in tracking Internet attacks back to foreign servers, Sandia supervisors told Carpenter that it wasn't in the lab's interest to follow or stop the attackers. They ordered him to stop and not to share information on the attacks, even after the FBI had requested permission to have him work the case under their supervision...
...informant for the FBI for the next five months. Reports from his cybersurveillance eventually reached the highest levels of the bureau's counterintelligence division, which says his work was folded into an existing task force on the attacks. But his FBI connection didn't help when his employers at Sandia found out what he was doing. They fired him and stripped him of his Q clearance, the Department of Energy equivalent of top-secret clearance. Carpenter's after-hours sleuthing, they said, was an inappropriate use of confidential information he had gathered at his day job. Under...
Carpenter was even more dismayed to find that his work with the FBI had got him in trouble at Sandia. He says that when he first started tracking Titan Rain to chase down Sandia's attackers, he told his superiors that he thought he should share his findings with the Army, since it had been repeatedly hit by Titan Rain as well. A March 2004 Sandia memo that Carpenter gave TIME shows that he and his colleagues had been told to think like "World Class Hackers" and to retrieve tools that other attackers had used against Sandia. That...
...Navy veteran whose wife is a major in the Army Reserve, Carpenter felt he could not accept that injunction. After several weeks of angry meetings--including one in which Carpenter says Sandia counterintelligence chief Bruce Held fumed that Carpenter should have been "decapitated" or "at least left my office bloody" for having disobeyed his bosses--he was fired. Citing Carpenter's civil lawsuit, Sandia was reluctant to discuss specifics but responded to TIME with a statement: "Sandia does its work in the national interest lawfully. When people step beyond clear boundaries in a national security setting, there are consequences...