Wasting Time With Alex

Drugs are bad, Hmmmmkay?

Well blow me down. Looks like the police in a regular raid on some drug dealer found to their surprise classified information from Los Alamos Lab on a flash drive. Now for those not up to speed, Los Alamos is the facility where the US conducts its nuclear weapons research, and where about 2 years ago flash drives were banned because of cases involving suspected clandestine Chinese agents stealing weapons technology and terrible mismanagement of security files.

(CBS/AP) Authorities in northern New Mexico have stumbled onto what appears to be classified information from Los Alamos National Laboratory while arresting a man suspected of domestic violence and dealing methamphetamine from his mobile home.

Sgt. Chuck Ney of the Los Alamos Police Department said the information was discovered during a search last Friday of the man’s records for evidence of his drug business.

Police alerted the FBI to the secret documents, which agents traced back to a woman linked to the drug dealer, officials said. The woman is a contract employee at Los Alamos National Laboratory, according to an FBI official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the case.

The official would not describe the documents except to say that they appeared to contain classified material and were stored on a computer file.

Sources tell CBS News the documents were found on a computer flash drive — a memory disk, the very type banned from the lab two years ago. At that time, the Energy Department prohibited all devices that can be easily copied, reports CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson.

So why would a lab employee be handing this stuff over to a drug dealer? This article doesn’t go into much detail about that, but there are only two plausible scenarios at work here and both involve the drug dealer working or hoping to work as an intelligence asset and the person at the lab giving out the information either willingly or unwillingly providing him that information. Of course it might turn out that the drugs angle is not really important, but my bet is that it is. I am very interested to see where this finally ends.