Schneier on Security

not litigious • December 8, 2008 5:55 AM

@Clive Robinson:
Wen Ho Lee should never have been prosecuted on the very weak evidence that had been collected, and it is quite right & proper that he has received $1.6 million in compensation.

However the current trend, to completely and utterly exonerate him of all suspicion, blows too far the other way. A great deal of what he did was, and remains, suspicious; and some Internet accounts of his snow-white innocence distort the facts to the point of fabrication.

For example, it is not true that the data he copied was public domain and unclassified. It was actually classified “restricted” at the time. Further, the reason it was later reclassified to “secret” was that the “restricted” classification was found to be a serious error; it should always have had a higher classification. Specifically, most of the copied data consisted of software for the simulation of the detonation of nuclear weapons, to enable designs to be tested without conducting actual nuclear explosions. In order to achieve some degree of accuracy, this software had embedded in it a great deal of data from previous nuclear weapon tests and US bomb designs, all of which was classified “secret”. As such, the software itself ought to have been classified secret rather than restricted.

Some activist sites seem to imply that the copying was routine, and could have been done practically in error. In fact, it took over 40 hours across a single two month period, and involved modifying file metadata to remove security markings.

It may or may not be true that Dr. Lee destroyed the downloaded data; we have only his own word for it. Computer forensics determined the number of tapes he had created, and when his office and home were searched, not all of them were found. When asked about the rest, he claimed to have destroyed them. Other explanations are, of course, possible.

It is not true that suspicion fell on Dr. Lee because he was born in Taiwan. That, of course, would make little sense if he was believed to spying for PRC!! In fact, he first came under suspicion during a wiretap of a suspect in a completely different espionage investigation in the early 1980s, when he appeared to be assisting that suspect to stymie an FBI investigation. The resulting investigation into Dr. Lee determined that he had not only assisted the suspect, but had himself passed unclassified-but-sensitive documents to a foreign power, in violation of DoE internal policies. The investigation concluded that there was no offense for which he could be prosecuted, but that he was not a fit and proper person to hold a security clearance. However, due to a communications SNAFU DoE was not advised of this finding until the second investigation years later!

It is also not true that he was completely open about his overseas contacts. At the conferences he attended in Beijing, every one of his US colleagues reported that the Chinese had attempted to elicit classified information, or to recruit them. The one exception who reported no such information was Dr. Lee. He did eventually admit that an elicitation contact had been made, but only years later, during a formal investigation of some of his suspicious behaviour.

That was kicked off by the weirdest incident, which occurred at the height of an FBI investigation into leaking of US bomb design data to PRC (for which no-one has yet been charged), and has still has not been explained. Dr. Lee walked in, unannounced and unauthorised, to a detente meeting with a top level delegation of visiting Chinese physicists, and warmly greeted Dr. Hu Side, the head of PRC’s bomb design bureau. In front of US officials, the two then held a conversation in Mandarin, in which — according to a US translator — Dr. Hu thanked Dr. Lee for his assistance in hydrodynamic modelling (a discipline which Dr. Lee performed for US bomb modelling.) Had this conversation been intercepted by wiretap, it would have been taken as strong proof of espionage. That it was openly made in front of US officials (albeit in a foreign language) left them perplexed, but most certainly stimulated an immediate investigation.

Durign the course of that investigation, the FBI arrived at the hypothesis that Dr. Lee was not specifically attempting to assist PRC, but was trying to establish credentials with any agency that might employ him in the event he was laid off from LANL, which he apparently feared. To test this hypothesis, they set up a sting operation. He didn’t bite, but he nibbled pretty vigorously — and did not report the contact from the “foreign agent.”