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U.S. Probes Internet Access of Los Alamos Computer
Monday January 24 1:24 AM ET
U.S. Probes Internet Access of Los Alamos Computer
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Federal prosecutors are investigating whether
someone outside the family of Wen Ho Lee, charged with illegally
copying nuclear weapons secrets, may have gained access to those
secrets via the Internet, The Washington Post reported on Monday.
The paper said someone on the campus of the University of California
at Los Angeles used the password of the former government scientist
on numerous occasions in 1994 to enter the Los Alamos National
Laboratory's unclassified network via the Internet.
Lee's attorneys say it was his daughter, Alberta, playing a computer
game.
Alberta Lee, who was a mathematics major at UCLA, has testified
before a grand jury that she often used her father's password in 1993
and 1994 to get into a supercomputer at Los Alamos to play Dungeons
and Dragons, a complicated computer game, the Post quoted Lee's
attorneys as saying.
But federal prosecutors are still trying to determine whether someone
else may have gained access to Lee's password, using it to read files
that Lee transferred from the classified, highly secure computer
network at Los Alamos to a less secure, unclassified network, the
Post said.
Lee, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Taiwan, was fired from the
New Mexico laboratory last March and indicted in December for
illegally copying classified information.
He has not been charged with espionage and the government has
acknowledged it has no evidence that any secrets were passed to
another country.
Password Used 70 Times
Over a period of a year, Lee's password was used about 70 times to
log in to the unclassified Los Alamos network from the UCLA campus,
the Post said.
It said investigators were examining whether it was merely a
coincidence that three of those sessions took place within hours
after Lee downloaded fresh batches of secrets to the unclassified
computer.
Lee has denied that he has seven tapes that he allegedly made from
classified files in 1993, 1994 and 1997.
Investigators have questioned why a college student would need one of
the world's most powerful supercomputers to play a game that was at
the time accessible on UCLA's computers via the Internet. Lee's
attorneys say that she wanted faster access provided by the Los
Alamos computer to a Web site in Switzerland that brings together
players from around the world.
The Post quoted one source close to the family describing this
portion of the government's case as ``a red herring.'' The source
said that after six months of investigation there was still no
evidence that any of the classified files were ``hacked into'' from
an outside source.
The paper quoted government officials as saying that the FBI has been
trying since last June to determine whether anyone other than Lee's
children was involved.
Scott Larson, the FBI agent who supervised the computer
investigation, testified that the Los Alamos computers in 1994
tracked all log-ins, but did not keep any record of what users did
once they were inside the system, according to the Post.
Larson said the security provisions in the Los Alamos computer system
in 1993 and 1994 were so poor that ``any file out on the unclassified
network was potentially vulnerable''.
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