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Los Alamos Missing Disks Never Existed 306

Posted by Zonk from the colossal-ooops dept.
Hal9000_sn3 writes "Turns out that the investigations carried out at Los Angeles National Laboratory over a matter of stolen research were flawed...because the missing disks never existed. Kind of hard to defend against having lost something you allegedly had access to, if the thing never existed." From the article: "Eventually, four were fired for security breaches, one chose to resign under the threat of termination and seven others received various formal reprimands."
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Los Alamos Missing Disks Never Existed More

Los Alamos Missing Disks Never Existed

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  • Well.. politics (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jokumuu ( 831894 ) on Saturday February 12, 2005 @09:44AM (#11651207)
    Thus again it it is proven that in an investigation like this the most important step is to find scrapecoats, even when the investigation itself is groundless.

    • Re:Well.. politics (Score:5, Insightful)

      by luvirini ( 753157 ) on Saturday February 12, 2005 @09:46AM (#11651217)
      Ofcourse, if there were no immediate terminations of people who were too bad at covering their asses, someone higher up in the chain might have to take the rap. Tuhus the higherup had to act fast to cover their asses or they might be in trouble, nevermind any innocents who loose.
      • Not to mention that it is imperative that they act FAST!

        • Re:Well.. politics (Score:3, Interesting)

          by wealthychef ( 584778 )
          Why do they act fast in this instance, while they are so often famously lackadaisical and incompetent when it comes to their main task?

          This underscores an important trait of all governmental organizations. Because they are of necessity and even by definition completely politically motivated, the thing they all must become very good at at is defending their budgets, which includes their payrolls. Results are never measured, because amazingly, that is not what their overseers (typically Congress or the mil

    • the one who "had to resign" was an extremely resepected scientst and a member of the national academy of science. He was essentially a vice president at the lab and the only member of the NAS who was at that level of management.

    • fear itself (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Saturday February 12, 2005 @11:52AM (#11651769) Homepage Journal
      No, it proves that security investigations that turn up security holes are very important, even when no damage has yet been done. Those people were fired because of actual unacceptable risks they created, discovered in the course of the investigation. If you want to talk about scapegoating, talk about the administration which jumped at the allegations, but never revealed that the actual damage was never done, because it would have been harder to spin that. Even though it would have reduced the fear among Americans that our nuclear programs are being compromised by active enemies. Who benefits from the increased fear?
      • No it was justification for firing them, If they were fired without a cause they can sue the government for big bundles of cash. Security as is an elisive term, its where you draw the line, so you can end up discriminating much without needed reason even though you were mistaken, that is if you have the power to lay where the line lies. I am ready speculate that this was the case.
        • AFAIK, the people were fired for breaking established security rules that they accepted beforehand, in order to work in that secure lab. I have no reason to believe that the lines were drawn after the fact, contrived to fire them. Do you have any evidence to support that view?
    • But the official said the episode had helped discover and fix serious security breaches at Los Alamos, and therefore the department had no regrets.

      I guess this gives a green light to government-backed fishing expeditions. Funny how heads rolled for a problem that didn't exist, but nobody is held accountable for the false information that started the whole mess. The Bush camp seems to thrive on imaginary monsters. I'm willing to bet that Los Alamos and WMD either are, or will be only the tip of the iceber
    • Remember the line in The Usual Suspects? The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.

      First they say the files are lost. They can't find them, so then they conveniently say the files never existed. Nice work, really.

  • I lost my pants (Score:5, Funny)

    by Xeo 024 ( 755161 ) on Saturday February 12, 2005 @09:44AM (#11651211)
    No, nevermind they never existed in the first place.

  • State-sponsored paranoia (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Black Parrot ( 19622 ) on Saturday February 12, 2005 @09:46AM (#11651218)


    Think of it as paranoia in action.

  • Did the fired workers make a mistake? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 12, 2005 @09:47AM (#11651219)
    This article doesn't go into too much detail, and doesn't clarify why the people were really fired.

    For example, if they didn't properly sign out the data and disks that they were borrowing, then they would be responsible for a mistake like this even if they didn't lose anything.

    There should never have been a question about who had the disks in a properly run lab.

    • Re:Did the fired workers make a mistake? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Black Parrot ( 19622 ) on Saturday February 12, 2005 @09:49AM (#11651224)


      > For example, if they didn't properly sign out the data and disks that they were borrowing, then they would be responsible for a mistake like this even if they didn't lose anything.

      Failure to sign out for non-existing disks? I suppose we're all guilty of that.

      • Yes, I'll admit that this was funny, but why would you mod it so? It was equally (if not more so) insightfull. By modding it as 'funny' you've actually deprived the OP of total karma. I wish more /. mods would realize that +1 FUNNY actually detracts from total Karma.
        • By modding it as 'funny' you've actually deprived the OP of total karma. I wish more /. mods would realize that +1 FUNNY actually detracts from total Karma.

          You assume that a "typical" article would hit +5 eventually, which does not hold true. Most posts get no moderation, a decent number get to +3, a few get to +4, and the rare one makes +5 (or -1... strange how those two seem to occur with rougly equal frequency - Fortunately, +5 helps a lot more than -1 hurts <G>)

          So, looking at it like that...
      • Evertybody not reading this, raise your hand.
    • I didn't read TFA but I remember when the story broke, there were some entries in a database that said they did exist. Apparently someone had generated a few bar-code stickers that were suppose to be put on disks, but they just ended up in someone's desk or in the trash...never made it onto actual disks. So, YES, somebody screwed up, but I don't know if it was the people who actually lost their jobs.

  • Missing disks was only one problem... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bigtallmofo ( 695287 ) on Saturday February 12, 2005 @09:50AM (#11651227)
    I'm glad to hear that the disks were not missing and in fact apparently never existed, but that only clears up one mystery.

    Were the missing notebooks that were reported, alleged Chinese hack-attacks, accusations against Wen Ho Lee and all the other reported security lapses phantoms as well?
    • More like

      The disk never existed.
      The disks were missing.
      The security breaches were solved.
      The disk were found back because the security was not that bad.

      and last but not least.. the data was not that sensitieve.

      Like a suspect pleaing to judge:
      -I never did it.
      - never was there.
      -I left before it took place.
      -The xxx forced me to do it. (not my fault.)
      - I am sorry about it.
      (b.t.w. perfect logic for a lawyer)

    • Re:Missing disks was only one problem... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by dont_think_twice ( 731805 ) on Saturday February 12, 2005 @11:10AM (#11651556) Homepage
      The Wen Ho Lee case turned out to be very similar - he was slightly sloppy with some data, as most scientists are, but he didn't do anything criminal. The moral of that story is that you can be sloppy with data, or you can be Chinese, but you can't be both at once.
      • The Wen Ho Lee case turned out to be very similar - he was slightly sloppy with some data

        Yes and no. The problem was not that he backed things up and accidentally took the disk home with him. The problem was that he intentionally copied classified data to his unclassified computer to back it up. This cannot happen by accident. Anyone who works with such data should knows exactly what will happen if they do this -- prison. In Wen Ho Lee's case, the assumption was originally that he was selling secrets

        • Re:Missing disks was only one problem... (Score:5, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 12, 2005 @12:11PM (#11651896)
          >The problem was not that he backed things up and accidentally took the disk home with him.

          Bzzzzzt, wrong. He did not take the disk home. Or the tapes for that matter.

          >The problem was that he intentionally copied classified data to his unclassified computer to back it up.

          Bzzzzzt, wrong again. He did not copy classified data. He copied unclassified data from a classified network to an unclassified one, then he made tapes of this unclassified data, then he stored those tapes in the highly secure lab he worked in.

          Then the media got a hold of the story and led the average joe, like you, to be very misinformed about the case. There are many many other details about the case you probably think you know, but which are wrong.
  • The XXX never existed, but the draconion measures we took were justified!

    "The WMD never existed, but the draconion measures we took were justified!"

    "The disks never existed, but the draconion measures we took were justified!"

    Just fill in the blanks...

  • Los Angeles National Laboratory? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Silicone Valley? I never would have thought...

    --
    ECFA.

  • Responsibility (Score:3, Insightful)

    by BillsPetMonkey ( 654200 ) on Saturday February 12, 2005 @10:02AM (#11651265)
    four were fired for security breaches, one chose to resign under the threat of termination and seven others received various formal reprimands

    All too often these matters are concluded by way of "well mistakes were made, lets just leave it at that and forget about it".

    As a US taxpayer (which I'm not) I'd want an investigation into the basis for the allegations and who made them. If someone is wrongly accused then the accusators have to be held responsible for their errors.

    • Re:Responsibility (Score:5, Insightful)

      by tomstdenis ( 446163 ) <tomstdenis@gma[ ]com ['il.' in gap]> on Saturday February 12, 2005 @10:21AM (#11651338) Homepage
      There you go again spouting "responsibility" ...

      That's been outlawed in the US.

      "Caution: Coffee is hot"

      "Caution: Don't drink like a fish"

      "Caution: Burgers are not healthy"

      "Caution: Fire is hot" ...

      Or "Caution: Show has naughty language" ...

      We don't watch our diets, we can't figure out that cooked things are hot and we can't raise our children.

      Why should we not point random fingers at the work place?

      Tom
      • Well there's crucial differences between personal and professional responsibility.

        In the case of personal responsibility, you may well disregard cautions, and in doing so you expose yourself to risk. In the case of professional responsibility, your position may enable you to do far more damage than burn your tongue or feed fat kids unhealthy burgers.

        I'm very uncomfortable with mistakes that are made professionally resulting in "no further atcion being taken". This is especially true in government where th
      • And don't forget: "Caution: Disks might not exis."
      • Not just the US. In a couple European companies, chainsaws have to bear a notice to "Keep hair and genitals away from blade while in use"
        • Somehow I don't doubt that.

          I was in a restaurant in Sene [near Vannes in France] and my friend got a flambe dessert. As she lit the alcohol on fire she said "careful it's hot"...

          I can see "careful it's on fire" but ... it's hot? hehehehe

          [BTW the french know how todo dessert... much better than Canadian/American stuff].

          Tom

  • Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition (Score:5, Interesting)

    by gadlaw ( 562280 ) <gilbert@gadl a w . com> on Saturday February 12, 2005 @10:02AM (#11651266) Homepage Journal
    A very funny Monty Python skit. Except the Spanish Inquisition wasn't funny and like any witch hunt you will find witches even when there are none to be found. The equivilent of the Spanish Inquisition swooped down on these people and heads were going to roll. It doesn't matter that there were no disks to go missing in the first place. It only matters that it's perceived that something is being done to correct the problem - even if that particular problem doesn't exist. There is bound to be some problem if we look hard enough. The vengeful, righteous persecutors who went and gleefully destroyed people can sleep happily in their beds because they are under the misguided belief that they found and burned their nonexistent witches with the full backing of god and country. It's a shame they don't make children watch The Oxbow Incident (old black and white movie about hanging cattle rustlers who were not guilty - a study in mob justice)

    • Re:Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition (Score:5, Insightful)

      by gihan_ripper ( 785510 ) on Saturday February 12, 2005 @10:25AM (#11651352) Homepage

      Or, for that matter, get children to read The Crucible by our dear departed Arthur Miller. I read this play at school and it simultaneously scared and angered me with its depiction of normal people committing monstrous acts when driven by the fear of demons within their community.

      Miller's play was, of course, an allusion to the McCarthy era witch-hunts, which at one point blacklisted Miller himself. These events are not far-off history or fiction, but relatively recent fact. If we aren't on our guard, hysteria can easily overcome even the most rational amongst us. It is up to each individual to confront their own fears and prejudices, for no one else can perform that task for you.

  • Politics again... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by the_skywise ( 189793 ) on Saturday February 12, 2005 @10:05AM (#11651276)
    Okay, this isn't the BIG missing disk story of the Clinton era, this is a set of missing disks from last year. Kerry was trying to make political hay out of this for the election year so the Bush Administration did what it usually does. Shoot first, ask questions later so Kerry couldn't accuse the Bush camp of being lax on security.

    So now the article screams false alarm and everyone appears to be lamenting the loss of money to UC and the loss of careers.

    Valid points to be sure but... What's the bigger mystery? That top secret disks disappear from a research facility? Or that non-existent top secret disks get reported as disappearing from a research facility?

    (Or in other words, did Karl Rove falsely report missing disks to make the Bush team look tough on security? Or did UC students falsely report missing disks to make the Bush team look weak on security?)

    • Re:Politics again... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by miu ( 626917 ) on Saturday February 12, 2005 @10:42AM (#11651423) Homepage Journal
      ...or maybe the Ninja forces of the Liberal Elite or the Bitch Droids of the Ann Coulter Army are impurifying your precious bodily fluids in such a way to make you make you believe that.

      The same people who laugh off as "conspiracy nonsense" any whisper of secret manipulation by leaders they approve of will gleefully impute the most ludicrous and blackhearted motives to those that they do not. I believe this was a pretty simple SNAFU that was blown out of proportion and stamped down on a little hard to make a point, these kind of things happen often enough naturally that there is no reason to believe the incident was engineered by one side or the other.

      • The power of this piece isn't in the incident itself. It's in the political manipulations of such... But then this is on Slashdot under the heading "Your rights online"

        Rights?
        • Agreed, both sides definitely had their propaganda machines ready to go on this - I'm just saying that conspiracy is the least likely explanation for the incident itself.

          I believe there are actual conspiracies, but I believe they are so complicated and likely to fail in an embarrassing way that they are rare. Either side could have made gains here, but actually setting something like this up would have been incredibly risky - even an apathetic populace might take notice of propaganda games being played wi

  • I too, have made this mistake! (Score:3, Funny)

    by stinkpad ( 810024 ) on Saturday February 12, 2005 @10:07AM (#11651285)
    When I was a gov.contractor with a high level clearance, we had to go through all kinds of security steps in the handling of classified docs... One day I had thought my PHB had lost his mind..... I was wrong, it never exsisted to begin with. We did not have to report it though, because it did not have anything to do with "intelligence".

  • I want to believe... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Shag ( 3737 ) * on Saturday February 12, 2005 @10:09AM (#11651291) Journal
    ...but when some super-secret branch of the government first tells me that something has gone missing, then later that oh, nevermind, it didn't exist... I remember that I am being told this by a super-secret branch of the government, and that said branch has probably zero reason at all to ever tell me the truth about anything.

    If they ever get around to "the missing uranium actually never existed," then I think I shall disbelieve.

  • Your rights online? (Score:2, Informative)

    by eihab ( 823648 )
    I hate to sound like this, but what does this have to do with my rights online?

    Is it "Your Rights Online" or "Your Rights.... Online"?

    Either way, it doesn't justify this article being submitted here.

    Interesting story though...

  • The Ghost of Joe McCarthy Called... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Radical Rad ( 138892 ) on Saturday February 12, 2005 @10:22AM (#11651343) Homepage
    He said "I may have destroyed many innocent lives but at least I never claimed to have caught anyone. These guys are going to give witchhunting a bad name."

  • This is more plausible than it sounds (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Concern ( 819622 ) * on Saturday February 12, 2005 @10:26AM (#11651357) Journal
    Oh, it could be a coverup. But inventory tracking in a secure environment would be a compelx system, a minor failure of which would look exactly like what we've seen.

    The confusion, it turns out, was created by inventory bar codes produced for computer disks that have never been written, a department official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

    On the other hand, as far as I can tell, this mistake, if it was that, is the best thing that ever happened to the place - there were multiple, serious problems with security and safety on the site that were addressed as a result of the hunt.

    "Although multiple investigations have confirmed that the 'missing' disks never existed, the major weaknesses in controlling classified material revealed by this incident are absolutely unacceptable, and the University of California must be held accountable for them," Brooks said in a statement.

    "Of even greater concern are significant safety weaknesses which came to light at approximately the same time," he added.
  • I don't know this really sounds like a cover up to me.

  • Conspiracy Theory? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DingerX ( 847589 ) on Saturday February 12, 2005 @10:31AM (#11651377) Journal
    A few things about Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory:

    They're under the direction of the Department of Energy and are managed by the University of California.

    Across the street from both one finds Sandia National Laboratories, managed by Martin-Marietta.

    Election-year antics with these two labs have become rampant of late: usually, the republicans go for security lapses and the democrats for environmental issues. This is in spite of the fact that the laboratories have a negligable environmental impact (the measuring devices at LLNL to detect toxic releases in the air from the research facility had to be brilliantly engineered to filter out the noise from the freeway 1 mile away, noise which is 1000 times larger than the "damaging environmental releases" they're supposed to detect and help prevent), and have an excellent security record (the "security incidents" are in fact created by failures in the security bureaucracy. If, for example, you have a policy to destroy secret documents after 20 years, and someone slaps a secret-document tracking program on top, suddenly the news reports "tens of thousands of secrets lost").
    In effect, these have beome largely political attacks on the Secretary of Energy, a cabinet-level appointment, and through that person, to the president and party in power.

    So why the "lax security" during a Republican administration? Those two labs employ something on the order of 15,000 people. THey're managed by the University of California. The University of California has one of the most solvent pension funds in the country. Martin Marietta(or Lockheed Martin, I forget. same company) has long expressed an interest in stretching their management across the street from Sandia to LANL and LLNL; in addition to the money they can make directly from government spending, they'll be free to raid that sweet pension fund.

    Of course, I'm just ranting. The Bush administration has set a steadfast policy of protecting the country's resources against corporate raiders.

    • Re:Conspiracy Theory? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by demachina ( 71715 )
      I was unaware that Lockheed was making a power play for control of the labs but it is 100% believable.

      Lockheed has turned in to an all powerful cancer on America, they are THE case study in Eisenhower's prescient warning about the undue influence of the military-industrial complex after World War II.

      Here is a pretty good article [counterpunch.org] on how they run the government, instead of the government running them. Some of its a stretch as is St. Clair's way but he has lots of fascinating little tid bits you never see i
      • Hmmmm. Someone from Lockheed must have some mod points this morning :)

        Sorry man, I know the truth about your company hurts, but that doesn't exactly make it flamebait. Its not exactly a secret that has the U.S. Government in general and the Republican party in particular wrapped around their little finger, much to the detriment of U.S. taxpayers. All those big campaign contributions and that revolving door hiring generals and politicians does buy influence, a lot of it.
    • A few things about Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory:

      They're under the direction of the Department of Energy and are managed by the University of California.

      Across the street from both one finds Sandia National Laboratories, managed by Martin-Marietta.

      Across the street? LANL is in Los Alamos, NM, Sandia is in Alberquerque, NM (over and hour from Los Alamos, and LLNL is in California.
    • Sandia New Mexico is in Albuquerque, nearly two hours away from Los Alamos. Theat's hardly across the street. And while it is true that the LANL contract will be competed this year, Lockheed has already announced they will not be bidding.
    • That explains why UC said this about the investigation:

      "Unfortunately, we deserve this," UC spokesman Chris Harrington said. "But what we have done is correct the problems and put the right system in place so that we don't have to take this type of hit again."

      I doubt UC would be admitting guilt if the evidence wasn't pretty damning [usatoday.com].

  • Awesome! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I think that this is actually the best that could have happened. First, the disks weren't stolen because they never existed. This means the disks weren't stolen. Disks not being stolen is a good thing. Secondly, alleged flaws in the security of the labs were found and fixed -- hopefully preventing anything from really being stolen in the future. Flaws being fixed is a good thing. We're up two and down zero. Cigars for everyone.

  • Some of theose people should have been fired... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Gruneun ( 261463 ) on Saturday February 12, 2005 @10:42AM (#11651419)
    Some of the ranting on here about "scapegoats" seems to ignore that some of the people were guilty of security violations (an obvious cause for dismissal), but the violations were only found after an investigation was triggered on misinformation. It doesn't make those people any less guilty of their security violations.

    The last two lines of the article should have made that clear, but I suppose most of the loud mouths never got that far.
    • I think there's some truth to what you say.

      On the other hand, do you really think the people punished got the exact same punishment they would have, if their errors had been uncovered under different circumstances? I mean, the management had already sworn that heads would roll. It would be nice to think there's a sound, rational basis for quantifying security breaches, and even-handed application of fairly written penal code... but in reality, I think circumstances and politics will weigh in heavily. H

      • On the other hand, do you really think the people punished got the exact same punishment they would have, if their errors had been uncovered under different circumstances?

        In the hush-hush government secret world, the expected outcome is that you at least get canned for breaches of security, and count yourself lucky that you didn't fuck up bad enough to land in prison. If you know someone (or your boss is afraid he might get tarred with the same brush), and nobody higher up has found out about it, you mig

  • old news. hire a Your Rights editor! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mattr ( 78516 ) <mattr&telebody,com> on Saturday February 12, 2005 @10:53AM (#11651475) Homepage Journal
    This was I believe reported [yahoo.com] by Yahoo news on Jan. 29. Today is Feb. 12!


    I believe /. should be able to hire professional journalists and editors. Especially for the "your rights online" section, though I think all sections (science anyone?) would benefit.


    Imagine investigating a story, reporting on an event before anyone else, even getting articles placed in other papers! It could be a dream job with people lining up to fund it. PLEASE consider what /. should be to this community and to the world in the 21st century. The interesting things going on in the world that readers submit (the core of /. I know) tend to deflect attention from the dessication that makes slashdot unfortunately resemble a fossil and not a very interesting one at that.


    Caveat, this coming from someone who just got a post rejected last week, but still there are a hundred geeks out there wanking on about two week old news and it's kinda dumb. Why not actually contact some congressional staffers and find out what's happening BEFORE the news breaks elsewhere? Like, news? You know?


    This is the weak point of slashdot's dependence on user submissions. There aren't any journalist users who are going to submit first to slashdot. Solve for x.

    • That sounds good in theory, but you know you'd just end up reading things like "Wisconsin Boy's Puppy Drowns: 'No Comment,' Says Microsoft."

      • Re:old news. hire a Your Rights editor! (Score:4, Interesting)

        by mattr ( 78516 ) <mattr&telebody,com> on Saturday February 12, 2005 @01:33PM (#11652446) Homepage Journal
        I don't understand why. Applicants would have to be professional and knowledgeable about both journalism and the topic of the slashdot section. There may even be slashdot readers who would like that job if it paid a salary, though my guess is someone from O'Reilly who also knows something about gathering people and companies together for conferences, books, sponsorship, etc. might be useful.

        Fact is there are a huge number of people in the U.S. alone who would sympathize with what slashdotters think about some of these issues if they knew about them and understood them, and the kind of money involved could pay for not only journalists but maybe even some open source projects. The interviews slashdot has are often interesting too, and journalists also do interviews.

        The point is to make things more professional, more aggressive, and not to compete with slashdotters but to provide things they can't, like journalistic focus, professional editing, networking with other groups, more neat interviews, etc. God forbid we ever had a photo of the people being interviewed either! How about some research into why there are so few women programmers, this issue parallels the flap the president of Harvard made recently.

        Here are some topics a journalist could investigate that might be worth something:

        What would it take organizationally, financially, scientifically, technically, politically and timewise, to actually develop secure, auditable, open voting machines? Is low-tech the only valid solution? This could be a series and the journalist would stay interested in it (unlike slashdotters) and try to follow the story, ultimately possibly finding out a monetary sum, likely sponsors, and likely teams.

        How come there are more female cosmologists than female physicists? Do movies like Contact have anything to do with it, or what? Another series, and one that should try to shine light on potential causes and solutions. Are there more women using Perl than Cobol or C? Would an easier path to bringing in documentation writers increase the number of both men and women involved in open source? and other theses.

        Is it possible to get funding for an open source project on your own so you can work on it full time?

        On TV they always have things like build your own house and so on. Are there other fields where open source concepts could be useful to people besides software?

        Slashdotters could suggest topics as well. Journalists could sift through these and find interesting ones. More tech-savvy journalists or perhaps programmers with some training in writing could do similar things. I'd like to get a journalist to follow up between Alan Kay and Larry Wall, to get to the bottom of what Kay wants and why Perl 6 isn't going to do it. (Or is it? Sounded that way to me...)

        Anyway these kinds of things are exciting, important issues and the idea of having thousands of captive smart people being stuck with unprofessional, passive editors like slashdot's is nearly criminal. It is worth paying someone to pay attention.

  • So, having worked in a secure environment (Score:3, Insightful)

    by porkchop_d_clown ( 39923 ) <<moc.em> <ta> <zniehwm>> on Saturday February 12, 2005 @10:53AM (#11651477)
    I have to say that this sounds even worse than having lost two disks.

    If the inventory of classified resources included completely imaginary items then how can it be trusted at all? If people assume that the inventory is wrong, then how will they know if something actually goes missing?

    Sorry, but I agree with the government - if these guys managed classified data so poorly they deserve to be fired and fined.
    • Thank god for your voice of reason in the midst of all the kneejerk bashing going on.

      The fact that the people responsible at Los Alamos obviously don't have the appropriate security oversight is an extremely dangerous security breach in itself.

      Mod parent up, he/she has got a clue about security.
  • {Jedi hand wave}
    These are not the disks you're looking for.

    Chip H.
  • I have no personal knowledge of the situation at Los Alamos, but the report doesn't surprise me. Security is only taken seriously when there are regular inspections and audits. Too many people will become complacent and let things slide if there is no mechanism to detect and correct problems. Good security slows things down and costs money, which makes it easy to rationalize cutting corners. Management often views it as a waste of their budget dollars.

  • Typical Comments (Score:3, Insightful)

    by HerbieTMac ( 17830 ) <5excelroa001@sneakemail.com> on Saturday February 12, 2005 @11:11AM (#11651562)
    The typical comment seems to go like this: "The disks never existed, therefore the people shouldn't have been fired."

    There are a dozen scenarios that could involved non-existant, classified disks for which people should be fired.

    -Person A creates a record of a disk, intending to classify a piece of media. Then doesn't. They forget to record the disk as destroyed.

    -Person B repeatedly writes inspection reports stating that the non-existant disk in fact exists. This indicates that they are not actually doing their job of inspecting.

    -Person C repeatedly signs off on the inspection reports that Person B writes, thus affirming the existance of a non-existant disk.

    Regardless of the fact that the disk never existed, all three people should be fired. First, they were not doing their jobs. Second, and more importantly, they facilitate the work of people like Aldrich Ames. By not immediately reporting the disk missing (or non-existant) any could have stolen the disk, sold its contents and come back for more without anyone noticing.

  • I'm sure of it (Score:2, Interesting)

    by GarbanzoBean ( 695162 )
    Surely, the University of Texas wanting to take control of Los Alamos has nothing to do with it, wink. And of cause, the ex-governor of Texas was a completely uninterested party.

    "Should the contract go to bid, the University of Texas might have an edge because it is in President George W. Bush's home state, said Pete Stockton, a senior investigator with the watchdog organization Project on Government Oversight in Washington, D.C., a loud critic of UC. And Bush doesn't have close ties with California, which
    • uninterested party

      I've often seen people write "disinterested" when they mean "uninterested", but this is the first time I've seen it the other way around.

      -1, Offtopic, I know.

  • Really bad reporting (Score:2, Informative)

    by clovis ( 4684 )
    This article is the result of trult execrable reporting. The missing disks were the least of the problems at the lab. The investigations began after an administration change and BEFORE the missing disks story. There was a theft ring operating out of the lab that even included one person charging a Ford Mustang on her office credit card.
    For references, read the local newspapers
    www.abqjournal.com and thealibi.com
  • It's unclear whether this is because of a real screw-up, or it's a cover-up for some seriously bad leaked information, and they want to say that it "never existed" like how UFO's "never existed"...
  • I repeatedly submitted this story to /. back in July and even posted it in a comment:

    http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?cid=9827294&sid=11 6107 [slashdot.org]

    Idiots.

  • uh? (Score:2)

    by anzha ( 138288 )

    Los Angeles National Laboratory doesn't exist. If you mean, Los Alamos National Laboratory on the other hand...

  • Sometimes counterintelligence sets up big ruses to catch people without giving away the fact that they had a mole on the other side.

    I wouldn't be surprised if the same was the case here. The FBI was looking for information on a known spy or source of leaks here (possibly one of the persons let go), but created the "lost disk" ruse not to give their hand away that they have penetrated the upper layers of the Chinese spy agency.
  • We don't have the whole story here. There is no actual explanation in the article as to why the persons who lost their jobs did, and there is no detailing of whatever actual security breaches may or may not have been discovered as a result of the clampdown initiated as a result of the not-missing missing disks.

    But even if we never find out what happened, I don't mind. The frickin' Soviets would up with the Bomb because of security breaches at Los Alamos (remember the Rosenburgs?). Sure, the USSR would p
  • Did that guy find behind the copy machine [cnn.com]?
  • Look for the fired and / or intimidated into resigning suing the pants off these incompetent fuckers for Wrongful Termination...

    RS

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