Great news this morning: Shawn Carpenter won against Sandia in Court.

Who? What?

Let me give you the background story: Carpenter was a security engineer, a former Navy guy, working for Sandia National Laboratories (R&D division of the Department of Energy). In 2004, while investigating security breaches within the Sandia's network, he found evidence of hacker access attempts. As a loyal employee he asked his superiors for a clearance to investigate these cases. The superiors denied investigations.

Why the hack did they refuse investigating of the hacking attempts to their sensitive network? A mystery it remains.

Shawn Carpenter contacted the Army Counter-Intelligence Group that linked him with the FBI, the latter asking Carpenter to follow up on his investigations. That is how the security engineer traced back the attacks to an chinese edge router.

What he uncovered was the so-called "Titan Rain" operation: a 2-years-long massive operation of cyber-espionage targetting corporate, R&D and defense information systems, most probably sponsored by the Chinese government. The detailed description of the case (pdf) by "Time" in 2005 leaves no doubt as to the operation's scope and the Chinese government implication in it.

When Sandia discovered that Carpenter was still investigating the online thefts and, what is more, shared his findings with the FBI and the Army, they did what? Right, they fired him.

The employee went to Court and won against his former employer a handful of dollars, 4.3m$ to be precise. The jury gave him twice the amount he requested and complimented Sandia in the following terms: "malicious, willful, reckless, wanton, fraudulent or in bad faith".

Shawn Carpenter now has his own wikipedia entry, and 4.3m$ for buying as many routers and proxies as he needs.