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Census Bureau Loses Hundreds of Laptops
Billosaur writes "According to CNN, The U.S. Commerce Department has lost 1,137 laptop computers since 2001, most of them assigned to the Census Bureau. According to Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez, 'All of the equipment that was lost or stolen contained protections to prevent a breach of personal information.' This comes after the fiasco involving the Veteran's Affairs Department's loss and eventual recovery of a laptop containing 26.5 million veteran and active-duty records." Given the scope of the operation, are these losses to be expected or is this an example of poor government security standards?
Don't consider them as "lost resources"; consider them a "job perk"...
If the Census Bureau only asked for number of men, women & children living in a domicile...and left it at that, like they are supposed to, there would still be an outrage over this loss, but the damage to privacy would be far less.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
'All of the equipment that was lost or stolen contained protections to prevent a breach of personal information.'
I would like to know what kind of protection is being used. Is it just password protecting windows? encrypted hard drives? This kind of blanket statement doesn't really tell me much about how safe the census data really is.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
all those thinkpads i keep finding at the local used computer store and how nice of condition they're in!
...
Sheesh, I hope I haven't ever acquired one accidenatlly
Maybe they should spend less time counting people and more time counting their computers. Or perhaps we should have a US Census Bureau's Computers Census Bureau. In any case, that sounds like an awful big loss of taxpayer computers, not to mention the data and the costs inherent in duplicating lost information.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
good thing they didn't lose their 1337 laptops!
I'll bet this is a direct result of their "Fill in our survey, get a FREE laptop!" promotion during the last census.
Dark Reflection
Given the scope of the operation, are these losses to be expected or is this an example of poor government security standards?
Yes, the standards are poor, but not as bad as it could be because at least it contains a protection on the data and it seems that no one has used it yet. But this isn't enough, because no matter what you have someone can break it. They should institute a policy of witholding some pay from empolyees as a form of fine whenever they lose a laptop. $1000 would be enough of an incentive to make sure that they stopped leaving them in coffee shops.
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
considering their job is to manually count every single person in the country, instead of using the lazy man's tool, inferential statistics. You'd think they'd be a little more detail-oriented....
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
I think it is a bit of both. Also, there is no hacker proof security setup that can GUARANTEE that noone will get into the missing laptops.
Honesty may be the best policy, but by process of elimination, dishonesty is the second best policy.
From TFA:
"All of the equipment that was lost or stolen contained protections to prevent a breach of personal information," said Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez. "The amount of missing computers is high, but fortunately, the vulnerability for data misuse is low."
Ya, OK, I know I feel better. My bet is that they all had some kind of encryption software installed on them that very little to none of the users actually use.
Let me guess... they put on Windows login passwords.
Since 2001? Hmm, at that time there were still lots of Win98 machines floating around even in business. You could assign a password, or just bypass the login with IIRC, pressing ESC.
The scary thing is that government moves so slowly when it comes to technology. It wouldn't surprise me that they're using some ancient encryption - decent for its age -- but completely inadequate with today's tools.
Temps, on the other hand, are a different story. Some of them feel entitled to keep the laptop as a lovely parting gift. Others feel the need to test the ability of the employer to retrieve the computer. When push comes to shove, it's not easy to retrieve a computer from a temp who lives in some remote part of the country -- without spending more than the computer is worth. If you have to send someone to visit in person -- game over.
I think that a big part of the problem is that Federal employees can't really be punished, unless they're grossly negligent.
In terms of job security, it's just below being a pedophile priest; most of the time if you fuck up, you might get demoted or shuffled around ("I see there's a warehouse in Sioux Falls that needs a manager...") but probably not actually thrown out on your ass by Security.
IMO, this leads to all sort of laziness and a general lackadaisical attitude on the part of a great many USG employees -- not all of them, to be sure, but it seems like there are usually 4 bags of useless skin for every one person who's pulling the weight of 5 people. It's about the only place I've ever seen that could honestly look to gigantic multinational corporations for advice on how to be more efficient. Total sausage factory, in other words.
The laptop losses don't really surprise me, because I doubt these people get more than some sort of administrative demerit -- if that -- for losing one. I'm sure there's some sort of procedure that they go through, but I'm willing to bet that in the long run they just get a new machine issued and they go on, grinding their way towards retirement.
If you want to stop these losses, I have a plan: tell people that they get one laptop. If they lose it, they can try to do their job without one, and if they can't do it, then they can find a new job somewhere else. Like the private sector. Maybe McDonalds. Or if you can't tolerate being that extreme, just make any loss of a laptop come with an automatic demotion of one Government Service grade. There's nothing like the fear of demotion to strike fear into the hearts of bureaucrats.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
5% shrinkage per year is considered doing a good job when it comes to managing laptop losses.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Bada bing.
Is this a bad time?
"I think that God in creating Man somewhat overestimated his ability."-Oscar Wilde
Laptops will be lost or stolen there is not much you can do about it. If the security depends on these not being lost or stolen the policies need to be changed.
You know i think they do this so they can buy more laptops from IBM, also theres the fact that the goverment is better then that if they wanted to be, like software if EVER connect online would report the laptop to the FBI, where they can trace it down to your house!
Wulfram 2 -- Free Online 3D game, Runs on a PII!
"According to CNN, The U.S. Commerce Department has lost 1,137 laptop computers since 2001"
Are they sure? Maybe they miscounted...
bada-bing!
OK, sorry about that.
I Heart Sorting Networks
How many laptops lost per household is that?
~
Seriously, though, I wonder what kind of security they had?
Was it designed by someone competent using well-known strong encryption, or was it designed by the same clowns who brought us DVD-CSS and Diebold?
I seem to recall that the DoD software for (classified) security clearance applications still uses 56-bit AES1 --- e.g., someone with significant (but not unobtainable) resources could crack the encryption. And if that's what the Department of Defense considers secure, it's not likely the Census bureau is doing any better...
Really is my race anyone's biz?
1137 laptops lost in 5 years. That's 227 per year.
12 months in a year. That's 18 laptops a month.
Considering that there are ~20 working days in a month, that's nearly one laptop lost
per working day for the last 5 years.
Fraud, waste and abuse.
Let's assume that at any given time there were about 20,000 laptops in use at the Commerce Dept in the five years since 2001. (30K laptops were used in that period, but some would have been swapped out during that time.)
1,137 missing over this period is a bit over 200 per year, or about 1% attrition per year.
I'd say yes. We're talking mobile pieces of equipment, easily hidden in a suitcase or even in coat these days.
The level of data compromise, as opposed to physical asset loss, is another matter, but then the article doesn't quantify that.
a world in progress...
Given the scope of the operation, are these losses to be expected or is this an example of poor government security standards?
How many laptops does the Department of Commerce have, total? What percentage of these were lost or stolen over the past five years? What percentage of laptops owned by other government agencies were lost or stolen during the same time period? What percentage of laptops owned by a private company (say, for example, WalMart) were lost or stolen during the same time period? If 1,137 out of however many the DoC has is unusually high, then this is a problem.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I know the lost information is the real story, but as far as taxpayer's dollars being wasted/lost - 1100 ThinkPads is about $2M dollars. The federal government's "burn rate" is about $4.2M per minute (based on a 2.25 trillion annual budget, which was the 2005 outlays), so this constitutes less than 30 seconds of spending.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
I was going to stay
1) Use a MacBookPro
2) Turn on FileVault
3) Problem solved.
But it appears as if there's an equally effective solution in Windows:
kb 307877 simply Click Start, point to All Programs, point to Accessories, and then click Windows Explorer, locate the file that you want, right-click the file, and then click Properties, on the General tab, click Advanced, Under Compress or Encrypt attributes, select the Encrypt contents to secure data check box, and then click OK If the file is located in an unencrypted folder, you receive an Encryption Warning dialog box. Use one of the following steps: If you want to encrypt only the file, click Encrypt the file only, and then click OK. If you want to encrypt the file and the folder in which it is located, click Encrypt the file and the parent folder, and then click OK.
(yesyesyes, if you detailed the procedure for enabling FileVault it would be nearly as long).
But, I'm 100% serious about this, why don't both Microsoft and Windows enable file encryption by default?
(Full disclosure. Do I use FileVault? No. Why not? Well, to tell the truth, I'm worried about bugs and glitches. There is safety in numbers. If Macs had FileVault enabled by default, then any bugs in it would cause problems for millions of users, and Apple would find out and fix them quickly. As it is, I suspect about 0.01% of all Mac users use it, and I've felt for a long time that one of the keys to avoiding OS trouble is to stay in the mainstream and avoid using anything that lots of people aren't using--unless I have a good reason).
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
RTFA. It says 1137 is out of "over 30,000". That's no more than 3.79%
I've noticed, lately, that /. has become a clearing house for Drudge articles and headlines . . . folks, if it's been on Drudge for over a day, it's baked. Don't submit it.
I know this sounds bad, potentially losing census data and all, but as a recipient of several of the computers used in the 2000 census (essentially hand-me-downs when they were done with the census to other Department of Commerce offices), there wasn't any personally identifiable information on the machines when we got. No laptops were in our transfer, but the desktops and servers were clean. We were asked to make sure that the hard drives had been wiped. All of the ones that came to us were.
I'm willing to bet that the number of "lost" machines is really much lower than the report stated. I just looked at our inventory and changes we submitted over the last couple of years (dead machines especially that need to be removed from inventory) haven't been made in the master lists yet. I'd chalk this up to carelessness with the inventory database more than carelessness about actual machine loss. After all, we're talking about 5-7 year old laptops. Who's really using those old boxes anyway?
Something like this should never be expected. That's the exact opposite. We should expect that our information be kept private and locked up somwhere.....of course this is the gov't and they have their own rules...
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
For a while governement employees were making all kinds of dubious charge to their work credit cards. Expecially in the Katrina cleanup when limits were loosened.
My company directly reimburses the credit company, but only for "approved" expenses. Sometimes things are not approved and the employee must pay it then.
Government needs to spend less time worrying about it's citizens and more time making sure its employees do their fucking jobs.
1100 laptops is a large number
I don't think the census bureau can really be expected to handle that many of anything.
"All of the equipment that was lost or stolen contained protections to prevent a breach of personal information." - Each was given a Dell or Sony battery ...
Bark less. Wag more.
"The rest of us will enjoy our risks and rewards."
Yes. Let's ALL keep that in mind next time the subject of outsourcing comes up on slashdot.
What does anyone, EVER put important (especially sentitive) data on a laptop? Do you have a locked and secure server room? Perhaps it should go there....
Sheesh.
Finkployd
Based on those numbers the standards are good. 5% loss of laptops is considered good in the industry.
"They should institute a policy of witholding some pay from empolyees as a form of fine whenever they lose a laptop. $1000 would be enough of an incentive to make sure that they stopped leaving them in coffee shops."
First of all, you seem to think they were lost in this manner as a matter of course.
What about robbery?
Second, you can not put a fine on something and have people suddenly not be careless. It happens. If it is a pattern of behaviour for a person, then you take steps.
I take a laptop home when I am on call, but if they instituted a policy that I had to pay to replace it if it was stolen, than I wouldn't take it home, and let someone else be on call.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
That seems a little rediculous, I mean who the hell loses 1200 laptops in 5 years? Time to start handing out pink slips and jail time.
I used to work at the Census Bureau. I didn't see anything like this in the IT groups -- they were pretty sharp. More likely this is a recordkeeping problem at Commerce where obsolete laptops were returned, properly disposed of and recorded correctly at the Census bureau but the knowledge didn't make it in to DOC records. It wouldn't be the first time.
Of course, this is a mildly uninformed opinion. I haven't worked at Census for a while and I had nothing to do with laptops when I did. I'm just saying there's something fishy with the notion that Census lost a thousand laptops. I don't buy it.
Besides, excluding the decennial survey-takers (temporary employees during the decennial census) there aren't than many people at the census bureau with government-issued laptops. Everyone would have had to disappear one laptop and some folks would have had to disappear two.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
TIA was "abolished"
TIA's biggest hurdle was a lack of data due to public outcry
Anyone think that these "losses" might be a cover for covertly putting untold millions of records into the hands of the groups working on these spying projects?
I'm more concerned about the "nearly 250 from the Census Bureau containing such personal information as names, incomes and Social Security numbers". I heard a sound bite about it from the Commerce Dept. statement this morning, they said not to worry, the data is, and I quote, "password protected".
Yeah, that's real comforting.
[command INSERTWITTYQUIP failed: insufficient wit]
How about a laptop for every lazy ass Federal Employee? What a goal. And I still wonder why I pay $4000 per month in taxes to the Gov.
Time to go on strike! No more taxes until every laptop is found! Asswipes.
The government loses computers all the time.
VA Contractor Loses Computer Containing Personal Data
August 7, 2006
A government contractor hired by the Veterans Administration (VA) to help process insurance claims announced that a desktop computer containing information on as many as 38,000 veterans had disappeared from its home office.
Energy Department lost computer equipment
At least 18 pieces of "computer processing equipment," including at least one laptop, are missing from the Energy Department's Office of Intelligence (IN), and department officials do not know whether any of it was used for or contained classified information, according to a new report from DOE's inspector general
Government Hit by Rash of Data Breaches
WASHINGTON (AP) - The government agency charged with fighting identity theft said Thursday it had lost two government laptops containing sensitive personal data, the latest in a series of breaches encompassing millions of people.
So why the House Panel Approves Electronic Surveillance Bill The government can not even keep track of their own computers. Let them monitor, then some one will lose the computer it is on.
Maybe, with the all the problems the government is having keeping track of their computers, we should ban the government from using computers. It seems to be helping the terrorists.
We should probably find an appropriate federal government agency and assign them to keep a regular count of how many Census Bureau laptops have been lost using some sort of mandatory survey, plus provide periodic analysis of the demographics of the laptop users and ...
Oh wait. Never mind.
Those nefarious hackers who stole the Census Bureau laptops have apparently cracked the encryption and already published all the personal, private data online! Here is the link.
Would they still have said "hundreds" if the number was like 1,000,000?
Given the scope of the operation, are these losses to be expected or is this an example of poor government security standards?
I sure hope you're only kidding and this is onyl a rhetorical question. Losses to be expected ? Is this a war ? One should really "expect" his data to be stolen ? One should easily just "forgive" state/government security policy weaknesses ? And we should just believe their word when they say all of those laptops contained data protection measures ? Oh come on.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
... that is the exact number of missing laptops?
- Andrew
I meta-moderate because I care.
Yeah... it's only (approx) $2 million of tax payer money... nothing to get worked up about. Just as long as no important data was stolen... losing tax payer's money is no big deal... it's the data that really counts.
Whatever...
All of the equipment that was lost or stolen contained protections to prevent a breach of personal information.
Like what ? a BIOS password ? A prosecution warning ? or was it really something serious like encryption that can't be broken in a few days ?
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Most other departments would have reported the loss of "over 1,000" laptops. At least we can count on the USCB to know just how many grew legs.
But what was their average age? And how many laptops filled out the Race and Ethnicity section? Are the Toshibas worried about racial profiling?
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Yes.
There's really nothing about any of this that denotes a requirement for these two conditions to be mutually exclusive. In fact, both statements clearly can be — and actually are — quite true, and it's probable that a causal relationship exists between the latter and the former. Most US government agencies are not known for being paragons of efficiency; the larger they become, the worse they're managed. The worse they're managed, the more their standards and parctices become lax, which is unfortunate, because data asset management and retention is tricky enough for even a well-run mid-sized organization.
I'm sure someone may have mentioned this..... employees had their laptop "stolen". 1100 laptops to go missing is kind of excessive. That's your tax dollars working for you.
And.. Anyone leaving a laptop containing someone else's personal info in a car unattended = fired (even if not stolen).
One can dream.
I'm a lazy bastard. Luckily, my primary job is technical support, which I do extremely well, happily, and without complaint (yes, I enjoy Internet Technical Support, no I'm not delusional or ill). So, between calls, I slack.
We used to have the office 'anti-social asshole' who did his job well and without complaint, but he got fired. We still have the office whiner (our highly unqualified, also lazy, network admin). And we have a few other more middle-of-the-road average guys mostly do their work, mostly don't gab, mostly don't goof off, etc.
I miss the office bastard. I have to do the work he used to do. That doesn't fit well with my 'lazy' persona.
Myrddin
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
So do private companies.
Of course private companies don't have to report it, so clearly they must not have this issue.
sigh.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I think that we'll just keep seeing more and more of this sort of thing in the news, as it seems that personal information is what the government wants to hoard. They will continue to push this "lost" information as potential ammo for identity theft. This way they can get more and more folks to buy into the manufactured "crisis" and get those people to reveal more and more of their own personal information to government databases for their own "personal security". This will lead to more people accepting the idea of being chipped with trackable implants, so that they won't be robbed of their identity. Give up liberties and privacy for security, yep, we all know where that leads. Look around today, are we freer than we were? (IMHO)
This is probably not as big a deal as certain other laptop leaks. These laptops are probably the ones that "field enumerators" carry with them as they make house calls gathering data for whatever litle project the Census is doing at the moment. I speculate that the data each one carries is only the few households the enumerator visited before the last time they turned their data in.
I worked in the 2000 Census and for that operation the collected records (not on laptops at the time) were turned in daily, checked to make sure there were no obvious errors (like the front page saying there are 4 in the household but say, 2 or 7 individuals were detailed further in), and shipped to the data scanning centers that same day or the next.
I would expect that similar procedures are used now with the electronic data being "turned in" daily, or at worst weekly. If I am correct about that, it would mean that the number of individuals exposed to their details is quite a bit smaller than other recent problems, even if every laptop taken had as much info in it as it normally had at maximum.
Which is still not good. My point is only that I think it's less.
I also read that way too. Just need 200 more laptops. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I was going to mention it, but I would think someone already said it. :P
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
...
Oh do the math and figure it out!
Based on my experience working closely with people in the USG, it's people like you that really keep the whole thing afloat ... however, for every one person like you, there are probably 3 to 5 people just sitting around, sucking down salary dollars and filling out mindless paperwork until they can retire.
... in the areas where the government is the only entity doing a particular kind of work (like, say CIA or NGIS stuff), people tend to be really good, because they're there because of the subject matter. But for just general administrative/paperpusher stuff, anyone with half a brain could earn more money in the private sector, meaning that the people left in government service are, in my experience, mostly there because it's safe and comfortable and they can't be fired. People who really couldn't survive in the real world, in other words.
I don't think anyone would say that all government employees are total idiots; that's obviously untrue -- if it was, nothing would get done. And no matter how little you like the government, it does get stuff done occasionally. So there are people working hard for the USG, but I think they're really getting the shaft.
There are some exceptions to this
I think that you're very likely one of the 20% or so of USG employees who do 90% of the work.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
If only they had lost 300 more laptops...
What did you expect???
... they had an accurate count of the laptops.
The last time we had a census, I filled out how many people lived in the house, and nothing else. The form was *very* intrusive, asking all sorts of demographic and lifestyle questions.
Weeks later, a census worker showed up at my front door. Instead of having her with fava beans and a nice chianti, I simply refused to answer her questions about household income, number of bathrooms, races of people living in the house, etc. When she mentioned a possible fine for non-compliance, I quoted the census part of the US Constitution, and asked her where she got the authority to do anything but count heads.
My wife was a little worried at the time, but she just sent me a one-line email: "Thanak God you didn't tell them anything."
668: Neighbour of the Beast
I would not worry TOO much about personal, private information being on these laptops.
There is a pretty thick security firewall between the novell and windows systems that 'normal'(administrative) Census Employees use and the heavily secure and locked down Unix systems that hold the Census data. They're very free with laptops for employees there, secretaries, accountants, whatever.
They tend to pretty much approve them for anyone who has anything close to a legitimate excuse for one. They have a huge IT budget, and they spend it. The inventory control in general there was fairly lax when i worked there and loaner laptops, for example, would often just 'disappear', but at WORST there would be some employee information on the systems, not any Census data. Most of those people just used them to do homework or run off flyers for church functions or whatever.
The guys that run the actual secure Census systems are very serious and very competant folks that take their jobs very, very seriously and are very good at what they do. I would be SCHOCKED if they lost any private Census data.
This is a waste problem, and not a security problem.
"because of encryption technology, the risk of data misuse was considered low, it said."
Unless the encryption was automatic, then someone careless enough to lose a laptop might have been careless enough to skip the encryption.
Not only do census takers ask questions to which they are not entitled answer--by any stretch of the Constitution--they store the information on laptops that any recently-fired hamburger flipper fucktard can walk around with and lose or trade for a couple rocks of crack.
slashdot broke my sig
Given the scope of the operation, are these losses to be expected or is this an example of poor government security standards?
Well I haven't even RTFA yet but let's see what the summary says shall we?
According to Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez, 'All of the equipment that was lost or stolen contained protections to prevent a breach of personal information.'
Any security incident that does NOT result in disclosing personal information sounds like an excellent security standard to me...
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
Hmm, so it's not that they can't asset-track but that they can't keep proper records. That's so much better for the census bureau!
... where stuff like this never happens [rolls eyes].
Not that I care, I'm in the UK
All of the equipment that was lost or stolen contained protections to prevent a breach of personal information.
... a Windows password. :-)
We had to report a few laptops lost for this data call, just because they were on our inventory sheets but nobody could find them. Chances are that they either were gotten rid of properly but not cleared off of the inventory, or they're sitting somewhere in our building and nobody found them during the last inventory. It's possible some are out there in the wild, but I'd be surprised.
"is this an example of poor government security standards?"
This many occurances makes it look intentional. It's only fair they let us spy on them too.
Are they lost, as in someone stole them? or simply not properly asset tracked? The article doesn't make it clear.
I bet there's less skullduggerry here than the article implies. For instance, my company probably has 800 Toshibas that it bought for employee use in 1997. Some sort of second generation Pentium-1, Win95 machines.
Do you think the company knows where any of those machines are today? Do you think anyone actually cares?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
I can see that kind of loss rate if the problem is employee theft by short-term temporary census workers or some similar special case.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Do you really think anyone in the GAO can even *see* numbers that small?
Now if the census bureau were having to take a census of laptops, they'd find them all in short order!
I am a census employee and the Hard drives are encrypted using a method devised by the NSA. It would be extraordinarily difficult to gain access to the data on the stolen laptops' harddrives, we take security very seriously and encrypt it at the same level you would expect state secrets to be protected at.
I have to post this anonymously because I might soon work for the Fed.
You have to understand what is going on here. It is getting close to elections, and congressmen are going rabid in the search for scandals that will get their names in the paper.
A certain waxy congressperson has suddenly "seen the light" and has started an "investigation" into gov't loss of "privacy data". This is amorphously defined as anything that can be stretched to look alarming in the newspapers - even an employees own phone number or email address stored in a text file on his own laptop can become a government leak of "privacy data".
Agencies are then "investigated" by demanding that they show the whereabouts of every laptop they have ever owned. A major portion of their IT staff is set to the full time task of hunting down this information for weeks since laptops are a distributed resource. If they can't find the paper work that they filled out when they disposed of any of the laptops they have to list them as "missing"...
So in the hands of overzealous clowngress members the information "Federal agency loses the paperwork that proves they erased the hard drives on on 1/10 of 1 percent of their laptops they disposed of", gets magically transmuted to "Federal agency loses 300 laptops which MAY have contained PRIVACY data!!!"
Such horror , susch drama, such B&llsh@t!
The real story here isn't lost laptops, its the millions of dollars spent by federal agencies jumping through hoops so policiticians can get their names in the papers!