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?

Comments

Heh.

[TheSHAD0W]

Don't consider them as "lost resources"; consider them a "job perk"...

heh. makes me think about ...

[Neuropol]

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 ...

Counting the wrong things.

[uvajed_ekil]

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.

It's only to be expected

[OakDragon]

I'll bet this is a direct result of their "Fill in our survey, get a FREE laptop!" promotion during the last census.

Census is leet

[imboboage0]

The U.S. Commerce Department has lost 1,137 laptop computers since 2001, most of them assigned to the Census Bureau.

Am I the only one who read this as 1337 laptops?

Laptops for sale!

[le0p]

Is this a bad time?

Are they sure?

[mrroot]

"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.

Re:No consequences means no responsibility.

[garcia]

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.

Sounds like just about every place I've worked. You have the office wanderer (the employee that is never in their office and you know you can find them in one of the offices of), the office chatterbox (the person that is always talking to someone on personal business), the office lazyass (the person who is in iTunes Store, surfing CNN, or printing some 100 page PDF on the schematics for their MAME arcade box instead of doing their jobs), and finally you have the office whiner (the person who doesn't do anything except complain to everyone (the chatterbox and wanderer especially) about how busy they are).

Then you have the people, like me, that do their jobs and go the fuck home w/o talking to anyone. We are considered the "anti-social assholes" because we get our work done, on time with praise, and make all the other douchebags look bad.

Yes, this is mostly a joke. Mod appropriately ;)

Re:No consequences means no responsibility.

[CokeBear]

What about that category of people what complain about all the others on Slashdot when they should be doing work?

Extra protection

[ubrgeek]

"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 ...