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"...

Re:Heh.

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Seriously, I'm sure the vast majority were just census takers who never returned them, and, hey, nobody ever came and got it!

Re:Heh.

[Otter]

Given that 1) they have a massive short-term workforce of census takers and 2) I doubt they were giving them 1999's highest-end hardware, I can't get too worked up about this. What would the government do with a slightly higher stack of Pentium 120s, build a bigger Beowulf cluster? As long as there was no privacy violation, this doesn't sound like such a bad loss rate for such a huge project.

what kind of protection

[CastrTroy]

'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.

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?

No consequences means no responsibility.

[Kadin2048]

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.

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.

[boristdog]

I worked for the federal govt for 6 years. The parent post is very true.

You are encouraged to toe the line, come in on time, leave on time...and not much else. If you do a good job you are "rewarded" by being kept in that position, because they need someone who can do the work. If you screw up, the only way they can get rid of you is by promotion.

Still, the efforts of the 20-25% who know what they are doing keeps the government working. Most of them stay for the security and benefits. I still have friends there who are good workers, but too afraid to face the real world (i.e. Private Sector) and are cranking away to that retirement and pension. I'm only 42 and I could be three years from retirement right now if I hadn't quit 16 years ago. But it would be only at half pay, which would be less than 1/4 of what I make now.

So give thanks to the timid hard workers who actually make the government work. The rest of us will enjoy our risks and rewards.

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?

Re:No consequences means no responsibility.

[Gilmoure]

Bingo! All I want to do is sit in my cube, take my calls, keep up with email and alerts and then go home. I don't want to escort the uncleared so they can sit on their ass 6 times a day and suck on a cig, I don't want to wander half-way across campus to hit the good snack machine or over priced grill and I sure as hell don't want some mouth breather hanging around my cube talking about millionaires playing with a ball. So yeah, I'm the unpleasant asshole that no one likes, who dresses weird (messy long hair, scraggly beard, Ornery Boy shirt (in a button down only shirt office)) and always beat everyone else's stats by 30%-50% every month. Feh.

1137out of a total of how many?

[winkydink]

5% shrinkage per year is considered doing a good job when it comes to managing laptop losses.

Running some quick numbers....

[Malfourmed]

From the article:

More than 30,000 laptops were used within the department's 15 operating units since 2001, the department said, and a total of 1,137 were stolen or missing.

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.

Given the scope of the operation, are these losses to be expected?

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.

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 ...