February 2010
Monthly Archive
Problems Protecting Classified Information at Port Hueneme
Posted by Eric Pecinovsky on 18 Feb 2010 | Tagged as: Cleared News
An article in the Ventura County Star reports that Port Hueneme Navy officials didn’t trust a security manager to keep classified information safe. The security manager for the Naval Facilities Engineering Service Center at Port Hueneme in 2008 was gone after 10 months on the job and put on administrative leave without pay.
The security manager, Gary Bigger, maintains security violations occurred at the base for years and is being made a scapegoat. Biggers said he was trained for the security manager position for two weeks.
An official 2008 Navy report related to his case revealed a list of security lapses and recommended that Biggers and other employees be stripped of their security clearances.
A twist in the story…
In May 2008, Biggers and his lawyer, Jack Futoran of Ventura, received a letter explaining why officials at the center were going to ask higher-ups to never allow Biggers to have access to military secrets.
The letter arrived in a package that also contained the investigative report. Futoran said he was surprised to also see, with the report, some photocopied documents marked “Top Secret” and “Secret.”
“These people deal with some extremely sensitive stuff,” Futoran said. “I immediately closed that (document),” and he told Biggers, “You can’t have this. I can’t have this.”
Port Hueneme is primarily an engineering, maintenance and construction base for various Navy functions. The Naval Construction Battalion Center at Port Hueneme is home to the Pacific coast “SeaBees”, the wartime engineering and building force.
Former Boeing Engineer Gets 15 Years For China Spying
Posted by Eric Pecinovsky on 11 Feb 2010 | Tagged as: Chit-Chat, Cleared News
Did you ever bring 300,000 pages of sensitive (i.e. aerospace and defense technologies) documents home to write a book without informing anyone, including your company? Me neither. A former Boeing engineer says that’s all he was doing. He was sentenced to more than 15 years in prison earlier this week. He was convicted of six counts of economic espionage that was said to have spanned 30 years.
The AP reports:
The government accused Dongfan “Greg” Chung, a stress analyst with high-level clearance, of using his 30-year career at Boeing and Rockwell International to steal the documents. They said investigators found papers stacked throughout Chung’s house that included sensitive information about a booster rocket fueling system — documents that employees were ordered to lock away at the end of each day. They said Boeing invested $50 million in the technology over a five-year period.
In his ruling, Carney [the judge] wrote that the notion that Chung was merely a pack rat was “ludicrous” and said the evidence showed that he had been passing information to Chinese officials as a spy.
Chung worked for Rockwell until it was bought by Boeing in 1996. He stayed with the company until he was laid off in 2002, then was brought back a year later as a consultant. He was fired when the FBI began its investigation in 2006.
To no ones surprise, China has denied any involvement. It’s worth noting that this case came about while investigators were looking into another suspected Chinese spy.
Of course, this is just one way to spy – another, bigger, growing problem exists.
CIA’s Talent Retention Program?
Posted by Eric Pecinovsky on 01 Feb 2010 | Tagged as: Chit-Chat
An article in POLITICO this morning is an interesting tale. Apparently, the CIA is offering their operatives to the private sector. The work they perform is not on “government time”, but as a side gig. When I first saw this story, I thought it would be agents consulting along the lines of corporate physical security or cybersecurity. In fact, they’re working for Wall Street firms.
The CIA defends the practice as a type of talent retention program, where highly trained CIA officers can supplement their government salary without leaving the agency for the private sector, where they stand to earn 2x to 3x their current salary. POLITICO describes the work of one such firm used by Wall Street firms.
“The firm is called Business Intelligence Advisors, and it is based in Boston. BIA was founded and is staffed by a number of retired CIA officers, and it specializes in the arcane field of “deception detection.”
The tactics that BIA officials such as these teach hedge fund clients are based in a program it calls “Tactical Behavior Assessment” which focuses on the verbal and nonverbal cues that people convey when they aren’t telling the truth.
Often, BIA deploys its CIA-trained operatives to analyze quarterly corporate-earnings calls…and BIA uses them to figure out if the company may not be disclosing the truth…The information they gleaned from this phone call could be worth millions of dollars.”
