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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."
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.
No, nevermind they never existed in the first place.
Think of it as paranoia in action.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.
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.
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...
Silicone Valley? I never would have thought...
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ECFA.
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.
"It's not your information. It's information about you" - John Ford, Vice President, Equifax
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.
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?)
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".
If they ever get around to "the missing uranium actually never existed," then I think I shall disbelieve.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
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...
If you can't mod them join them.
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."
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.
Tired of Political Trolls? Opt Out!
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.
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.
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.
http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82
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 believe
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
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.
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.
Clear, Dark Skies
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.
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.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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
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
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?
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make install -not war
I repeatedly submitted this story to /. back in July and even posted it in a comment:
1 6107
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?cid=9827294&sid=1
Idiots.
I repeatedly submitted this story to /. back in July and even posted it in a comment:
1 6107
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?cid=9827294&sid=1
Idiots.
Yea, but hot enough to cause 3rd degree burns, require skin graffs, and require 8 days hosipitalization is not too hot because there is another 30F until I get to boiling. It's a hazard to serve any drink above 140F. The coffee was at 185F, McDonald's knew it. At 185F the coffee is not consumable and the product (drinkable coffee) was defective. It's not like she was the first person to get burned, she was the 700th person McDonalds had known about with the same types of burns. All McDonalds had to do was lower thier coffee maker's temprature to be the same as the rest of the industry. She sued for to get help with her medical coverage, but the jury was so angry that McDonalds knew about the danger and let person after person get injured.
Disclaimer: I don't and can't speak for LANL. If you want the official word, call the Public Affairs Office and ask to speak to one of the mouthpieces there.
The primary reason Lee has the reputation as a wronged man is because Americans really, really liked "The X-Files". People _want_ to believe that the resources of the US government were brought to bear on an innocent man in an election year to promote or dissuade shadowy agendas hammered out by smoking men in darkened rooms. Even better that he was foreign-born of the inscrutable Chinese race, because now it means the shadowy government is racist, too, and didn't we always know THAT? OK, that's probably not the primary reason, but I do think it's a strong component. People pride themselves on "seeing through the lies". It means they're smarter than the evil government. It bolsters their self-esteem.
Another major component is that we are bound by the same rules Wen Ho was, only we actually do take them seriously. It's difficult to say much about what he did without violating classification rules. That puts Wen Ho and his defenders at an advantage in that they can say things like "Everyone at Los Alamos copies classified data onto unclassified media and takes it home"; we can't say "On this and this and this date, Wen Ho copied this and this and this computer file in violation of the Atomic Energy Act." We simply cannot talk about what he took and how he took it.
We have indeed seen many changes in policy and practice lab-wide since the summer of 2000. As fate would have it, this past summer's incident was a violation of procedures implemented in the Wen Ho fallout. Even more new rules and procedures have been piled on since the stand-down of operations. Some of those rules are subject to -- you got it -- classification and don't get talked about on the outside. Others are freely discussed. Suffice to say that after this summer, even getting one's hands on a piece of writeable media is a herculean challenge. Infrastructure is being upgraded and employee training has been augmented. We're better now than we were a year ago, and that was better than five years ago.
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
Director Nanos single-handedly dealt an enormous blow to the American and world science by shutting down the operations at Los Alamos for MONTHS - all for nothing more than dominance games. If the Cold War were still on, I would suspect him of being a Russian mole.
Let me state that the knowledge of the total absurdity of the lleged "security breach" in Los Alamos is nothing new. Larry Barker of KRQE News reported that the scandal was fake in August 2004. Read the August 11, 2004 artile from Santa Fe New Mexican.
To conclude, I am much saddened by the mindless regurgitation of the official lies in this thread.