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In 2013 a contract employee at the Los Alamos National Laboratory found himself stripped of his security clearance and suspended from his job shortly after he published an article arguing the benefits of getting rid of nuclear weapon stockpiles. This month he begins mediation with the lab after his second whistleblower claim was accepted by the National Nuclear Security Administration. Dr. James Doyle worked at the Los Alamos lab, one of the laboratories in the Department of Energy nuclear complex, for 17 years. Prior to submitting his article for publication, he had it reviewed by a classification analyst at the lab, met with the director of the security office to address any concerns, and made it clear in the article that he was providing his own opinion as an individual and not as an Energy Department employee. But just two days after the article was published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Dr. Doyle was accused of disclosing classified information. Lab officials searched his personal computer, retroactively classified the article, and suspended his security clearance. Dr. Doyle was understandably confused and filed a complaint alleging that lab officials were retaliating against him for expressing unpopular opinions in the article. After filing the complaint, Dr. Doyle was fired from his position at the lab and his whistleblower complaint was rejected. While the Department maintains that his termination was due to budget cuts, Dr. Doyle believes it was due to his push-back against the retroactive classification of his article.

Several nuclear watchdog groups, including the Project On Government Oversight, rallied around Dr. Doyle, sending a letter in 2014 to the Secretary of Energy and the Inspector General urging a review of his case. Dr. Doyle filed a second complaint because he was fired before his first complaint was resolved. The Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor reported last week in an article titled “NNSA Accepts Second Whistleblower Claim From Laid-Off Los Alamos Analyst” (behind a paywall) that this claim was accepted in late 2014 and that Dr. Doyle began mediation with the lab this month. This is a step in the right direction, and one step further than his first complaint ever got.

Baltimore Police didn’t bother to inform the public (or anyone, for that matter) when they implemented a privately-funded mass surveillance program in January using a wide-angle camera-equipped plane flying above the city — which instantly uploaded and stored everything it recorded, just in case they needed it later. As Bloomberg’s Monte Reel reports, a small Cessna plane equipped with “a sophisticated array of cameras” capable of capturing “an area of roughly 30 square miles,” funded by an a private donor and provided by Dayton, Ohio-based Persistent Surveillance Systems, sometimes circled above the city for up to 10 hours per day recording and storing everything without anyone being privy to its presence. Since January, Reel noted, the Baltimore Police Department has been using this covert Big Brother’s eye-in-the-sky “to investigate all sorts of crimes, from property thefts to shootings.” Gone, apparently, are the days when the government’s surveillance state drew ire for attempting to ferret out potential terrorists — residents of Baltimore have been guinea pigs for an altogether more insidious spy dragnet. Persistent Surveillance Systems’ technology automatically stores all the footage on massive hard drives, making it available to law enforcement long afterward — but the idea police could access this information to solve a simple property crime is no less than alarming.

Particularly considering the company’s founder has an intense military background. Ross McNutt, Bloomberg reports, “is an Air Force Academy graduate, physicist, and MIT-trained astronautical engineer who in 2004 founded the Air Force’s Center for Rapid Product Development. The Pentagon asked him if he could develop something to figure out who was planting the roadside bombs that were killing and maiming American soldiers in Iraq. In 2006 he gave the military Angel Fire, a wide-area, live-feed surveillance system that could cast an unblinking eye on an entire city.” Though the technology had imperfections — even determining the gender of a person on the ground was impossible — its TiVo-like capabilities more than made up for any shortcomings. A person of interest could be followed by rewinding footage after, say, an IED exploded roadside, to track their movements — even if the cameras weren’t focused directly on the explosion at the moment it occurred. If the cameras were in the air at the time, anything that happened was fully trackable both back and forward in time. McNutt’s pitch for his technology concisely summarized, “Imagine Google Earth with TiVo capability.” Angel Fire truly evolved at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico after 2007, when upgrades allowed for “all-weather and nighttime capabilities and then was used as the basis for another system, called Blue Devil, which coupled wide-area cameras with narrow-focus zoom lenses in the same package.”

Over time, after McNutt retired from the military, he worked to further improve the camera array and attended security conferences in hopes of garnering clients. After a brief but effective test run over the skies of Ciudad Juárez, Los Angeles became the first U.S. city to employ Persistent Surveillance’ system — and just as covertly as what has been taking place in Baltimore for the last eight months.

This week Robert Alvarez published an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists about the National Nuclear Security Administration called "Rebranding the nuclear weapons complex won’t reform it." The piece details the long history of the Department of Energy’s management (and mismanagement) of the nuclear weapons complex, the establishment of the semi-autonomous NNSA, and the many conflicts of interest that have prevented the downsizing of the sprawling U.S. nuclear weapons complex. Alvarez also highlighted the astronomical costs associated with these facilities and recommended a truly independent commission, made up of specialists who do not have conflicts of interests, to review the complex:

Lab overcapacity, in particular, contributes to an inflated weapons complex cost structure, within which the average full time employee is two to three times as expensive as in the private sector. Since 2006, when management of the weapons labs was transferred from the nonprofit University of California to for-profit entities, administrative fees have jumped by 650 percent at Los Alamos. The bloat in the weapons complex is hardly limited to the national labs; the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant in Tennessee has excess capacity that is comparable, in size, to two auto assembly plants. The Obama administration should establish a commission—one, this time, that is not dominated by the very contractors that run the nuclear weapons complex—to analyze and downsize the redundant elements of that complex. The Defense Department accomplished such a downsizing over the past 20 years; it's long past time for the Energy Department to begin shedding its surplus capacity. Given that weapons facilities dominate the wage and benefit structures of large areas in several states, such streamlining will no doubt meet stiff congressional resistance. Still, the downsizing sword could eliminate redundant facilities and free up funding to rebuild those that are truly needed.