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21 June 1997: Link to related documents: http://jya.com/whpfiles.htm

8 March 1997
Source: William H. Payne
These reports relate to William H. Payne's suit against the National Security Agency.

Albuquerque Journal, April 25, 1993, pp. A1, A14, A15

## Fired Worker Files Lawsuit Against Sandia

Specialist Says He Balked When Lab Sought Electronic Picklock Software

By Tamar Stieber

The stuff of spy novels is hidden in a sealed federal lawsuit against Sandia National Laboratories.

William H. Payne, a former computer specialist at the nuclear weapons laboratory, claims he was fired last year because he wouldn't help steal computer software that could have been used to break into electronic locks worldwide.

If this brings to mind the recent movie "Sneakers" with Robert Redford and Sydney Poitier, there's good reason. Like the movie, Payne's lawsuit deals with cryptology -- the science of creating or translating secret codes.

In fact, Payne spent 10 of his 12 years at Sandia building "cryptographic microcomputer systems," according to a 36-page complaint be filed Feb. 18 in U.S. District Court in Albuquerque.

Also, like the movie, the lawsuit involves the National Security Agency, which operates the Defense Department's Computer Security Center and conducts high-tech electronic and satellite surveillance around the world.

Payne claims in his complaint that he was terminated last July because of "his discovery of fraud and plagiarism ... his disclosure of waste in government research contracts and his refusal to engage in criminal activity."

Payne, 55, also claims age discrimination and alleges that Sandia technology is being used for "industrial espionage."

The case file has been sealed at Sandia's request.

Sandia officials won't comment on the lawsuit, citing national security concerns. Spokesman Rod Geer did say, however, "There are no instances that we know of in which a federal agency has used our work for illegal purposes."

In a letter to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, lab officials said Payne was fired for "conduct that had the potential of compromising the mission of a valued customer as well as that of Sandia, and for behavior designed to offend the valued customer."

Documents available to the Journal indicate the "valued customer" is the National Security Agency.

The Sandia letter also accused Payne of violating security regulations and disregarding his department's policies on releasing unclassified information.

Payne, who earned $63,000 a year, contends his supervisors wanted to get rid of him because he began to question the legality of certain projects assigned to him.

One such project, according to the complaint, involved an assignment last year from a project leader in the Systems Research Center -- an intelligence-gathering and technology group sponsored at different times by such organizations as the National Security Agency, FBI and CIA.

His assignment, the complaint says, was to investigate how to build a portable device that could copy any floppy computer diskette.

"This device would be used to steal software," the complaint states.

When Payne balked, his supervisor said Payne "did not choose his jobs. Rather, Sandia assigns duties to" him.

Six months later, the complaint says, another project leader removed a computer-operated keypad from Payne's office.

Payne says in his complaint that he had been asked to evaluate the keypad's hardware for applications at Sandia and its parent agency, the Department of Energy. But he says the private corporation that sold the device to Sandia had done so on the condition that no one at the laboratory retrieve the secret internal software that opens electronic locks.

Payne believes a supervisor ordered a co-worker to unsolder a computer chip from the keypad and make an unauthorized copy of the software, the complaint says.

Payne contends he then was ordered to develop a software process allowing the user to open electronic locks controlled by the keypad technology, and alleges a supervisor told him that he "wanted to break into" facilities protected by the keypad.

Payne claims he also was told to build a portable device for copying magnetic strips on the back of automated teller machine cards, such as those used at banks.

Payne says he refused, recalling that a security investigator once told him his clearance could be revoked if he knowingly became involved in suspected illegal activity. A senior member of Sandia's technical staff since 1980 and the author of three computer texts, Payne was stripped of his security clearance badges on July 17. His Sandia identification and building key were taken and his briefcase was searched before he was escorted to the gate.

Ten days later, he was out of work.

Payne filed an age discrimination complaint with the EEOC about two weeks after he was fired. His lawsuit says one of his supervisors had implied that Payne was worth less than a younger employee and that he "was too old for any job to which he might be transferred."

Payne's plagiarism allegation involves Sandia's Deployable Seismic Verification System, where Payne worked from 1986 to 1991.

Sponsored by the DOE, the system was designed to monitor nuclear tests in the former Soviet Union, as outlined in the Threshhold Test Ban Treaty -- an underground nuclear test limitation agreement between the two nations.

Payne claims supervisors copied his notes on declassifying a "data authenticator" -- which ensures that incoming data has not been altered -- and tried to pass the information off as their own work in an attempt to enhance their careers.

He also says orders to test the data authenticator at unsecure locations threatened his security clearances, which are required for work at Sandia.

Sandia's allegations that Payne violated security rules stem from a letter Payne sent to a University of Tokyo professor last year, which the laboratory said contained "inflammatory and derogatory comments about this sponsoring agency" -- the National Security Agency.

According to Sandia, Payne also sent the Japanese professor three technical reports which, though unclassified, contained "very sensitive information."

Payne, however, claims in his lawsuit and other documents that he sent only one unclassified report to Japan in an attempt to drum up business for Sandia and the DOE, but only after he got permission from the laboratory.

Payne alleges his letter to the Japanese professor was used as an excuse for his discharge. Further, he contends various supervisors tampered with his personnel file; inflicted emotional distress on him by accusing him of violating Sandia's security rules and threatening him with 70 years in prison; and fraudulently "manufactured accusations in its written attempts to justify (his) termination." Payne seeks money damages for lost wages, reinstatement to his job with all lost benefits restored, punitive damages and attorney fees.

Payne names 15 defendants in his lawsuit, including Sandia President Albert Narath and Roger Hagengruber, vice president in charge of Sandia's weapons program.

The remaining defendants are Sandia supervisors and co-workers involved in projects sponsored by the FBI and the National Security Agency.

Some defendants the Journal was able to contact declined to talk about the case. The rest did not return phone calls.

Defendant Harold Folley, a Sandia attorney, said he instructed Sandia personnel named in the lawsuit not to discuss the case for national security reasons and because it is under seal.

"I'm not going to prejudice my position with the court by commenting," Folley said when reached at the laboratory on Monday.

One of the defendants, Systems Research Center director William Childers, said he'd like to comment but couldn't. "It's terribly frustrating to me as you can imagine because I'd like to be able to talk to you about it."

Neither Payne, who lives in Albuquerque, nor his attorney, Stephen Aarons of Santa Fe, would discuss the lawsuit. They said they were prohibited from doing so.

Nor would they share any documents from the file, which U.S. District Judge C. LeRoy Hanson sealed at Sandia's request.

But Aarons, a former Army Intelligence and Security Command Judge advocate in Western Europe who had "top secret special intelligence" security clearances, says unsealing the lawsuit wouldn't threaten national security.

"There is nothing classified in the file," was his only comment to a reporter.

Aarons, in fact, has urged the court to unseal the case.

The Albuquerque Journal was able to obtain a copy of Payne's complaint and some other documents in the court file.

In one document, Aarons refers to "the cloud of secrecy under which defendants desire the court, counsel and the parties to operate."

"On information and belief however embarrassing may be plaintiff's allegations ... such allegations should in no way be hidden under the guise of national security interests," he wrote.

Aarons told the court that the "permanent veil of secrecy on this litigation" is against the public interest and "is neither workable or justified."

"The threat of harm from discussing the fact that the National Security Agency contracts work to Sandia is speculative at best," wrote Aarons, adding that it's "hardly newsworthy" that New Mexico's laboratories engage in classified research.

David Glass, an attorney with the Justice Department, wrote to New Mexico lawyers in the case.

"As I have advised each of you the United States wishes to ensure that classified information is not revealed in this case," Glass said in the March 17 letter.

Glass declined to comment when contacted in his Washington, D.C. office this week.

> [Photo] This 1991 photo shows the robotics laboratory inside Sandia National Laboratories, which fired computer specialist William H. Payne claims tried to make him misuse its technology.

[End]

Electronic Engineering Times, March 21, 1994, p. 49

### Dataport

By Loring Wirbel

## One man's battle

Several readers familiar with the intelligence community contacted me regarding a Feb. 21 column (see page 83) in which I dismissed the National Security Agency (NSA) as a paper tiger. Most agreed that NSA's ability to direct cryptology policy is overrated, but apparently many of you are well aware that this paper tiger can bare some pretty fearsome teeth when it wishes. Take, for example, the fate of engineer William Payne.

Payne was an expert at the Department of Energy's Sandia National Labs (Albuquerque, N.M.) specializing in reverse-engineering of electronic-lock systems and development of verification systems based on generalized feedback shift-register designs. He had already fallen into the NSA's bad graces in mid-1992, when he published a study of seismic verification systems under Sandia's auspices. His paper criticized NSA's authentication algorithms for seismic verification systems used for studying seismic "events" that might be nuclear tests.

Payne was fired in July 1992; in December 1992, he sued Sandia and NSA. He claimed he had been ousted after his discovery of "fraud and plagiarism" and because of his refusal to "engage in criminal activity" for a program the Department of Energy laboratories call "Work for Others." A front-page article on the suit appearing in the Albuquerque Journal last April raised issues of whether NSA was abusing its relations with the national labs in order to find ways to develop viruses, decrypt ATM cards and smart cards and sabotage private signature keys. One FBI/CIA project called Casanova sought to break Hirsch keypad electronic locks.

While Sandia has demanded that the suit and proceedings remain under seal, Payne has stayed as vocal as the law allows him to be, recruiting the help of special interest groups such as the Government Accountability Project. Payne said that several agencies, including NSA and the FBI's engineering research facility, regularly abuse the national labs' Work for Others programs to enlist the help of engineers and programmers in snooping work of a questionable legal basis.

Payne specifically refused to keep work classified, which he said involved illegal conduct by technical intelligence agencies. But David Glass of the Justice Department's federal programs branch has warned Payne that a decision in the 1980 case Navasky vs. the CIA clearly establishes that classification procedures do not become moot if the intelligence agency breaks the law. In other words, the king -- in this case, NSA or CIA, can do no wrong by definition, and one may not question the king's legality.

This type of argument raises the dander of conservatives. Consequently, analysts on the right, ranging from William Safire to Chuck Baker, are joining with liberal civil libertarians to question the validity of NSA's basic mandates for technical intelligence, leaving only high-tech centrists like Al Gore and Sam Nunn insisting that the NSA not be questioned.

Payne said that his particular case is complicated by the fact that NSA is trying to take back authority for cryptography from the national labs, particularly Sandia. NSA relied on Sandia and its classified RHIC-II fab in the mid-1980s, until the NSA finished a classified fab at decade's end.

Payne hopes that Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary's openness will spur a willingness to settle his suit with Sandia out of court. U.S. District Judge John Conway has bent over backward to give the government everything it seeks, Payne claims, including stifling his ability to talk about particulars of the case. But Payne said that "the best way to challenge NSA is to be as public and vocal as possible. Many others in my position have been crushed by buying into the silence NSA demands."

[End]

Electronic Engineering Times, April 11, 1994, p. 32

### Crosstalk

## Protecting properly classified info

A recent statement by Loring Wirbel (see March 21, page 49) -- "Payne specifically refused to keep work classified, which he said involved illegal conduct by technical intelligence agencies" -- requires clarification. Never have I released or failed to safeguard any properly classified information. I have always been in compliance with all Department of Energy classification guidelines and presidential executive orders.

My Sandia project leader and several supervisors told me to illegally copy an American company's security software from microcontroller internal memory to floppy disk. I was told to disassemble object code. The purpose was to reverse-software-engineer the code with the intent of defeat. I signed a non-disclosure agreement with this company. I was told to do this illegal work behind the veil of classification abuse. I refused. I protected, and have always protected, properly classified information.

Bill Payne Albuquerque, N.M.

[End]

Electronic Engineering Times, June 6, 1994, p. 134.

### Dataport

By Loring Wirbel

## Damn the torpedoes

I got my way-cool "Sink Clipper" poster from RSA Data Security Inc. last week. It depicts a beleaguered ship of state bearing National Security Agency (NSA) flags being torn asunder in stormy seas. That seemed to be a sign to launch my quarterly tirade on national information and intelligence policies. Those of you who trust our government can skip this week's column and return in two weeks for more chat of bit streams and high-layer protocols.

The latest thing to set me off wasn't the NSA's back-door forcing of the Digital Signature Standard as the nation's official ID policy. It wasn't the latest hearings in Congress on the Clipper chip though EE Times Washington bureau editor George Leopold assembled enough ominous quotes at the hearings to make the blood run cold. It wasn't even the intelligence community's abuse of working engineers such as Bill Payne of Sandia Labs.

Rather than any of that, the event that made me want to frame the RSA poster was the little-noted launch of a gargantuan satellite from Cape Canaveral on May 3.

The $1.5 billion satellite is a joint project of the NSA and the National Reconnaissance Office. At five tons it is heavy enough to have required every bit of thrust its Titan IV launcher could provide -- and despite the boost it still did enough damage to the launch-pad water main t render the facility unusable for two months.

The satellite is variously known as Mentor, Jeroboam and Big Bertha, and is has an antenna larger than a football field to carry out "hyper-spectral analysis" -- Reconnaissance buzzwords for teal-time analysis of communications in a very wide swath of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Clipper and Digital Signature Standard opponents should be paying attention to this one. Mentor surprised space analysts by moving into a geostationary rather than geosynchronous orbit. Geostationary orbit allows the satellite to "park" over a certain sector of the earth.

This first satellite in a planned series was heading for the Ural Mountains in Russia at last notice. Additional launches planned for late 1994 will park future Mentors over the western hemisphere.

According to John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists, those satellites will likely be controlled from Buckley Field (Aurora, Colo.) an NSA/Reconnaissance downlink base slated to become this hemisphere's largest intelligence base in the 1990s.

Multiple Mentors will make it easy for technical intelligence agencies to perform an unannounced "breakout" from their pledges to refrain from domestic surveillance. That is in addition to mandated use of Clipper and the Digital Signature Standard -- a requirement that will give the NSA and National Reconnaissance office the capability in theory, if not in practice, to monitor all Internet and National Information Infrastructure traffic anywhere in the world. Given the ambitions of the NSA and Reconnaissance, Clipper's opponents may have confined their arguments to too limited a scope.

Many in Congress are calling for a new post-Cold War analysis of the CIA's mission and budget. Yet those same people are surprisingly silent about the NSA and the Reconnaissance Office -- agencies with budgets far larger than the CIA's.

I concede that we need some terrestrial and space-based monitoring of trouble spots. But we also need a public, open debate on the missions and budgets of the technical intelligence agencies.

Those opposed to Clipper and the Digital Signature Standard should widen their agenda and tell members of Congress to pursue such analyses.

[End]

Electronic Engineering Times, January 22, 1996, p. 84.

### Dataport

By Loring Wirbel

## State-sanctioned paranoia

I finished this column just before leaving for the RSA Data Security Conference in San Francisco. RSA (Redwood City, Calif.), as you may know, is the company responsible for implementing and licensing many public-key cryptography patents. RSA president Jim Bidzos thumbs his nose at the National Security Agency, insisting that private industry should not follow the security lead of the intelligence community.

I went to RSA in a very anti-feds mood. The recent information that has crossed my desk on Energy Department and Defense Department shenanigans makes the budget-deficit debate look like an inconsequential sideshow.

First, an update on Albuquerque, N.M., engineer Bill Payne. Payne, you may remember, was fired from Sandia National Labs for refusing to do spook work for NSA on Sandia time. Payne has gotten the runaround from the U.S. District Court and 10th Circuit Court, even as top Sandia executives have been drowning in allegations of fraud and sexual harassment. But the snubbing has made Payne more determined than ever, as he writes letters and files new charges against government officials at multiple levels.

In November, DOE Secretary Hazel O'Leary paid $225,000 to the National Academy of Public Administration to investigate the possibility of settling outstanding suits brought by Payne and several other DOE whistle-blowers. But the NAPA effort may come to naught, given O'Leary's current problems. It's true that O'Leary has played fast and loose with funds at times, but Washington insiders are united in their belief that the DOE old guard is leaking anti-O'Leary stories to the media because they want to crush whistle-blowers, not settle with them.

Next in my in-basket was a set of reprints from the Baltimore Sun from the paper's NSA series, which ran in early December. The series reveals the setup by the NSA and CIA of a new covert collection agency, the Special Collection Service, and details the case of Hans Buehler, an employee of Crypto A.G. who was thrown into an Iranian prison after getting snared in a Crypto/NSA sting against that country.

The NSA series looks mild next to the new book from Jeane Manning and Nick Begich, Angels Don't Play This HAARP (Earthquake Press, Anchorage, Alaska). The authors dissect the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program run by the Air Force's Hanscom and Philips Labs at the Poker Flats Range, near Gakona, Alaska.[*] While the book was rushed into print with typos and factual errors, the authors do a good job separating the public Haarp story from the facts.

Haarp is an array of dipole antennas that send a focused GW beam to the ionospheric layer for mostly nefarious purposes. The Air Force likes to point to defensive uses of Haarp, such as replacement of ELF communication transmitters in Wisconsin and updates on over-the-horizon backscatter radar. But Manning and Begich cite patents held by Haarp contractors that indicate the site would be far more useful as a large-scale beam weapon and a long-distance-signals intelligence platform.

You won't hear about this in the press. Haarp was one of Sonoma State University's Project Censored winners last year for blacked-out news. And journalists who should know better appear to be buying the Air Force's cover stories on Haarp.

My government has done little in recent months to make me proud. Maybe Newt's threats to keep things closed until November would have a positive effect -- except that the DOD, DOE and intelligence community, for reasons of "national security," would not be subject to the shutdown.

[End]

[* See recent report on HAARP, from Science, 21 February 1997.]

The Albuquerque Tribune, March 27, 1996.

## DOE boss accelerates whistle-blower protection

By Lawrence Spohn

Whistle-blowers who tried to reveal wrongs in the Department of Energy years ago but got punished instead may yet see justice, Secretary of Energy Hazel O'Leary said.

She is accelerating whistle-blower policy reforms and wants an independent agency to recommend solutions, particularly for thorny cases, some of which have defied resolution for nearly a decade.

"As part of this policy, I want to see if there is a practical way to right past wrongs against some of our workers," O'Leary said Tuesday.

"I am committed to a policy of zero tolerance for reprisals against our workers throughout the department's complex," she said.

O'Leary specifically requested that the National Academy of Public Administration in Washington D.C. follow up on DOE whistle-blower cases.

NAPA, the congressionally chartered business equivalent of the National Academy of Sciences, is to formulate innovative methods and standards for resolving those that occurred before April 2, 1992.

The cases originated before DOE issued new regulations protecting employees from reprisals and providing a procedure for reviewing their complaints.

The news was greeted with joy by Leo Mascheroni, a maverick fusion physicist who was fired nine years ago by Los Alamos National Laboratory in a head-on collision of scientific ideas.

"I love it," said Mascheroni, who lost his job after he proposed an alternative fusion energy laser that threatened the status-quo research of the secret military fusion program.

He says he was wrongly fired on trumped-up security violations, a contention that later was confirmed by Los Alamos-based DOE security officer Bill Risley, who independently investigated the case for headquarters.

"They punish me, my ideas and my family for 10 years," said Mascheroni, an Argentine immigrant who says he still has a lot of hope for the American system."

Accused at one point of being a spy and hounded by DOE security agents, Mascheroni said, "My case is the opposite, really, of democracy. When they did what they did to me, I couldn't fight back.

"I chose to live in hell for my ideas and I won't let them go now," he said "They still must resolve the scientific issues."

He continues to demand that DOE conduct an independent scientific review of the costly military fusion research program.

Similarly, Albuquerque's William Payne called O'Leary's news "fantastic," but said his experience had taught him to be apprehensive.

"You would be too, if they did you and your family like they did me," he said.

Payne lost his job four years ago at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque when he said he refused to steal computer security software and electronic locks in work for the National Security Agency.

"But they are right," he added. "It's clearly in the best interests of DOE and the national interests to resolve these cases quickly. I hope they do, but I'm not counting on it. I'm suing 'em."

In a report completed last December but released by DOE Tuesday, NAPA investigators advise "that a special procedure should be developed that will review the 'old cases' expeditiously in a cost-effective manner and provide finality to them."

In its first-phase look at the problem last year under a special $225,000 DOE contract, NAPA found that whistle-blowers in "old cases had no viable procedure within DOE to address their allegations of retaliation."

NAPA's mission is to help federal, state and local governments research and implement innovative strategies for institutional change."

Its findings are based on interviews of 169 people and 40 whistle-blowers, including Mascheroni and Payne in New Mexico. Other interviews were conducted at or near DOE facilities in Oak Ridge, Tenn.; Savannah River, S.C.; Richland, Wash.; and Rocky Flats, Colo.

The report notes that whistle-blowers had pursued solutions "in multiple forms in the hope that one or another will provide a remedy."

According to DOE officials, at least four whistle-blower cases are unresolved at New Mexico's two national labs or the DOE's Albuquerque Operations Office, which oversees the nuclear-weapons complex.

O'Leary said she has assigned the whistle-blower problem to Acting Under Secretary Thomas Grumbly, who has been overseeing the department's [?] environmental cleanup.

[End]

The Albuquerque Tribune, September 27, 1996.

## DOE doesn't plan to compensate 'old' whistle-blowers with money

Lawrence Spohn

The Department of Energy is preparing to negotiate pilot settlements with some of its "old" whistle-blowers -- former employees who suffered retaliation after exposing wrongdoing at DOE facilities. The test negotiations of five whistle- blower cases are expected to begin as soon as next month and could include a New Mexico case. But they apparently will not involve the most fundamental ingredient -- monetary compensation for the whistle-blowers.

Government critic Tom Carpenter said that's because DOE attorneys this month claimed the department does not have congressionally appropriated funds for such purposes.

The claim, advanced by DOE chief Basle Robert Nordhaus, throws a last minute legal monkey wrench into Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary's effort to settle the cases equitably and quickly, says Carpenter.

The so-called "old whistle-blowers" include some who worked at Sandia and Los Alamos labs in New Mexico.

The cases involve former DOE or national laboratory employees who reported safety, health or security abuses within DOE. The employees eventually lost their jobs, their security clearances, or both.

The "old" cases occurred prior to 1994, when O'Leary ordered formal terms and whistle-blower protection.

The DOE issued a statement Thursday that "monetary relief is generally unavailable."

Carpenter, who heads the Government Accountability Project in Washington, D.C., said he is stumped as to what whistle-blowers will be offered if they're not offered money.

Jeff Crater, who heads the settlement process at DOE, said attorneys will review each case and monetary settlement may be possible but it is unlikely.

He said the test cases will "explore non-monetary remedies" such as "clearing names or purging employment records of negative material," and in some cases could mean job reinstatement.

Carpenter said the pilot effort is encouraging but without money might only frustrate the process.

Bill Payne, a former Sandia National Laboratories employee, agreed. He lost his job four years ago when he says he refused to steal computer security codes and locks in Sandia work for the National Security Agency.

"If they can't give just compensation, they're just going to continue to get sued," Payne said. "They have millions to defend against whistle-blowers. How come they don't have money to settle, and save the taxpayers money in the long run?"

Crater said O'Leary has suggested that after testing the settlement process in the five cases, the DOE might be able to seek a special appropriation from Congress to provide money to resolve the cases, perhaps as many as 125 total nationwide.

Carpenter said he participated in two DOE "brainstorming" sessions in June and earlier this month that explored how to settle the cases.

He said DOE chief counsel Nordhaus raised the money roadblock at the second meeting, which O'Leary attended.

The sessions followed a report last year by the National Academy of Public Administration that recommended "a special procedure should be developed that will review these 'old cases' expeditiously in a cost-effective manner and provide finality to them."

Some cases are more than a decade old, such as that of maverick Los Alamos physicist Leo Mascheroni. He says he was fired in 1985 after challenging Los Alamos' fusion energy research program.

"I've thought of him," said Carpenter, suggesting that Mascheroni's case is a natural for the pilot process.

Mascheroni's case is considered very strong because a DOE security agent at Los Alamos has filed a formal department report exonerating Mascheroni. He says Mascheroni was fired over trumped-up security charges after the physicist questioned the lab's fusion research program's direction.

Mascheroni declined specific comment because his court case is pending. But he said generally, "I don't understand what it is they are going to give whistle-blowers if not money for the efforts they did and what they went through."

Mascheroni, who remains unemployed, continues to battle the government on legal and scientific fronts.

He is demanding that DOE fund a national scientific review of his alternative fusion energy proposal, which some scientists say has merit.

He is being assisted by other rebel scientists at Los Alamos and at New Mexico State University.

The DOE statement issued Thursday reiterated O'Leary's policy of "zero tolerance for reprisal" against employees who complain about improper or unsafe work practices.

"Our whistle blower protection reforms seek full, fair and final resolution of employee concerns in order to maintain a safer and more productive workplace," O'Leary said in the statement.

The department also announced the creation of anew Office of Employee Concerns, to be headed by lawyer William Lewis Jr., formerly of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

The office will handle enforcement of whistle-blower protection as outlined by O'Leary in the Employee Contractor Protection Program adopted in 1992.

[End]

For more William Payne's case with the Department of Energy, see listings by DOE associated with his name at http://altavista.digital.com