Los Alamos Missing Disks Never Existed

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."

Comments

Well.. politics

[jokumuu]

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.

Did the fired workers make a mistake?

[Anonymous Coward]

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:Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition

[gihan_ripper]

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.

Re:Missing disks was only one problem...

[dont_think_twice]

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.

fear itself

[Doc Ruby]

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?