US State Dept. Loses Anti-Terrorist Program Laptops

Stony Stevenson writes "It has surfaced that the US State Department can't account for up to about 1,000 laptops, perhaps as many as 400 of which belonged to the department's Anti-Terrorism Assistance Program. Internal auditors found that the department lost track of $30 million worth of computer equipment, 'the vast majority of which... perhaps as much as 99 percent,' were laptops, according to one official. Another official calculated that the average State Department laptop costs US$3,000 and figured that meant as many as 1,000 laptops might be astray — not 10,000 laptops as the US$30 million figure suggests. They're obviously not very good at maths."

Comments

Broken Window Fallacy

[corsec67]

The parable of the broken window might be of interest to you as to why this is a bad idea.

You are saying "it is ok to steal from people if that money is going to be used to buy other things", right?

Re:$3000 for a laptop??

[Chris Mattern]

It's not like they have repurchase the same software for the replacement computers.

Haven't dealt with Microsoft lately, have we?