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Classified Nuclear Weapons Data Taken From Los Alamos So Technician Could Work at Home, Lawyer Says
A woman under investigation for removing classified documents from Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory in Jessica Quintana, a 22-year-old former contract worker at the nuclear weapons laboratory, had been employed on a project to convert paper documents to electronic format. None of the material she brought home was given to anyone else or copied in any way, said lawyer Stephen Aarons. “It was downloaded, but it was never uploaded,” he said. Aarons said Quintana brought the material home to help meet a deadline to index the documents, but she never did the work and forgot about the documents. The information was discovered last month after local police arrested a man at her home for drug and parole infractions. A subsequent search yielded more than 200 paper documents and three portable data storage devices containing more than 400 files, according to an Energy Department memo acquired by the laboratory watchdog group Nuclear Watch New Quintana held a Sigma 15 Q clearance, according to the memo, a security level that would have permitted her to read documents about permissive action links, the methods used to ensure that nuclear weapons cannot be detonated without formal authorization. Although she was working with technical documents, she did not understand them, Aarons said. “She doesn’t know anything about nuclear weapons,” he said. “She knows how to scan documents.” “There was no espionage, but a person trying to do her job who made a bad judgment on how to do her job,” Aarons added (Deborah Baker, Associated Press/Santa Fe New Mexican, Nov. 3).
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