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Los Alamos Missing Disks Never Existed

Posted by Zonk on 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."

14 of 306 comments (clear)

  1. Missing disks was only one problem... by bigtallmofo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

    --
    I'm a big tall mofo.
  2. How exactly is national security bolstered by ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    ... numerous nuke experts convinced of having been disenfranchised in politically motivated "purges" and "sacked as scapegoats" ?!

  3. Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition by gadlaw · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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)

    --
    Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
  4. Lost Disks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    "No matter how paranoid or conspiracy-minded you are, what the government is actually doing is worse than you imagine."

  5. Conspiracy Theory? by DingerX · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Conspiracy Theory? by demachina · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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 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 in main stream press.

      A few choice lines:

      - each household in the U.S. is estimated to pay $228 just to Lockheed in their taxes each year.

      - Through heavy exploitation of tax loopholes their tax rate is around 7%, try getting that tax rate if you work for a living.

      - The C-130J debacle described in the article is classic. The planes have so many design flaws they are useless to the Air Force. Some of them were to be Hurricane chaser replacements but the composite propellers are so flawed you can't fly them in bad weather. I heard a DOD budget briefing last week and it appears they are finally shutting down this disaster of a program. Instead of punishing Lockheed for incompetence they are going to pay them another billion dollars or so in shut down costs to reward Lockheed for delivering planes that are worthless.

      I assure you Lockheed has plenty of incompetence of its own and there is NO way it should take over more national labs, but it probably will because it has acquired such massive influence over the government, and especially over the Republicans.

      --
      @de_machina
  6. Re:Cover your butt by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I work at a research lab where most of the employees need clearances. I was curious about RFID tags that were superglued to the walls at various locations. I was told that they replace bar coded labels that used to be scanned by security guards for a record of monitoring on their rounds of the building. WHY? because the guards got the bright idea that a photocopied sheet with the bar codes for their assigned security tour could be scanned at the right intervals and they would never have to leave their desk or their coffee and doughnuts to walk the hallways.
    ...and yer damn right I am making this comment in cowardly anonymity.

  7. old news. hire a Your Rights editor! by mattr · · Score: 3, Interesting
    This was I believe reported 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.

    1. Re:old news. hire a Your Rights editor! by mattr · · Score: 3, Interesting
      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.

  8. Re:State-sponsored paranoia by digitalchinky · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Speaking of security staff, a while back I was at the ADSCS (DSD field site) one of the 'admin/security' staff had 'misplaced' a laptop. *cough* stolen *cough* Yup, that one was brushed under the carpet... You pop the lid on a can of coke on the feops floor and you'll be in front of the OH&S commission before the 'Psshhh' sound is even finished.

    (Feops - front end operations - where all the flashy lights are)

    Another ironic twist - DSD head of security (Lets call him Mike) telephoning me for a 'safe' combination - on an old analogue mobile phone while on leave. (Australia pre-gsm) Sigh... (No, I didn't give it :-)

    Yellow post-its with vault combinations, passwords, you name it. It happens. 'Yeah but the 'entire building' is considered a class A safe, the standard excuse'

    Then you get slapped with positive vetting review. Makes you want to give it all up for a nice job as a taxi driver.

  9. I'm sure of it by GarbanzoBean · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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 he lost in the 2000 election."

    www.bayarea.com/mld/cctimes/5034980.htm

  10. WTF, I SUBMITTED THIS STORY OVER 6 MONTHS AGO!!! by brian0918 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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

    Idiots.

  11. WTF, I SUBMITTED THIS STORY OVER 6 MONTHS AGO!!! by brian0918 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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

    Idiots.

  12. Re:Well.. politics by wealthychef · · Score: 2, Interesting
    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 military) want to see. Instead, they seek to generate "anecdotes of progress," for dog-and-pony shows put on for the public or for Generals or Congresspersons or other politically important folks.

    So yes, the innocent must be fired, so that when people ask, "Is security better now?, LANL can say, "look, we did something!" There is no probably no real intrinsic driver to really make security top-priority, other than the patriotism and consciences of those involved. While many are patriotic and take their responsibilities seriously, this is not as urgent a pressure as getting a paycheck, and the best way to do keep doing this is to not get noticed. These poor people got noticed.

    --
    Currently hooked on AMP