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Sysadmin Steals Almost 20,000 Pieces of Computer Equipment
coondoggie writes "Now this is some serious computer theft. We're talking 19,709 pieces of stolen computer equipment from the US Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC. The theft included everything from PCs and printer toner to hard drives, software and other office equipment amounting to over $120,000, according to court documents and published reports."
So my guess is a few big ticket items, and then lots and lots and LOTS of some small item.
Where do I find these $6 computers this guy is stealing?
19,709 pieces of stolen computer equipment [...] amounting to over $120,000
Wow, that's almost $6.09 per stolen item! Truly, this is comparable to a $700,000,000,000 wall street bailout.
What does this have to do with YRO? That is, unless he stole the suff over SSH...
In further news, a source inside the Pentagon reports that 17 pencils have been reported missing over the last three months. "These are critical communication devices, built to mil spec standards. They have the potential to inflict injury to an untrained operator. The Pentagon takes these communications security breaches quite seriously, and we will be looking for further funding to study this National Vulnerability."
It seems to me that he did clear out the archive of old and useless equipment. Think about it: 20K of stuff worth 120K in US dollars? That's an average of 6 dollars per item, and you can rest assured that it won't be the minimum that they are quoting. Also, how can you be missing 20K of equipment? Well, easy, since it was probably collecting dust anyway.
But stealing is dangerous stuff, because you will upscale as long as you can get away with it. Once you've started it, it's more difficult to stop, since you've already taken the moral hurdle. And at some time someone is going to miss something, either because of bad luck or because the person taking the stuff is moving upwards.
I've got an old passive AGP Matrox dual head card laying around the office. It would be a perfect fit for one of my older computers. But I won't take it, even though I'm sure it won't be used anymore. That said, the way companies handle old equipment could be considered criminal as well.
... I believe you still have my err, uh, stapler.
wants to be free!
And I felt bad when I used a company CD-R!
Why is this thus? What is the reason for this thusness?
Seems pretty lenient considering this is a case of grand theft and potentially identity theft since there was information about contractors. It could also be construed, perhaps, as terrorism or treason considering the organization the equipment and data was stolen from.
Contrast this with penalties for copying music over the internet. Is "Enter Sandman" a more valuable national resource than naval research equipment and data in Washington?
The servers were refurbished and donated to a charity as their office servers and the surplus PC has been my desktop for over a year.
If you never ask, the answer will always be no. On the whole, people are nice, if only you are nice to them. Would you deny someone a piece of old equipment if they asked nicely? Then why should someone deny it to you?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I have a, eh, 'friend'....that used to work for M******** Aircraft many years ago in Long Beach. He had full area access due to his job, and that part was unusual, but it meant he could come and go as he pleased - his job also meant driving a van full of equipment on a regular basis.
His method was to first move equipment around inside the plant, waiting to see if anyone noticed. When the stuff went unnoticed for a period of time (say after an audit), he would load up and drive off base to his home, where the van would be unloaded.
This went on for years and he eventually changed jobs.
It was almost three years later that investigators came to his new home, hundreds of miles away. When they walked up to his door, they could see the open garage that was stuffed to the ceiling with everything from o'scopes to monitors to cameras...on and on and on.
In the end, the company got it all back (he kept and took very good care of everything), and only charged him with theft of one almost worthless item, since that was the only piece they felt like parting with long enough to prosecute. They later told him they were shocked to find him with so much stuff...they said their research told them it would take more than a dozen people to pilfer so much equipment.
Apparently he didn't get any of those $600 toilet seats or $900 hammers that we used to hear about the military procuring.
Life needs more saving throws.
Steeling from your "boss" is quite a common phenomenon. some say that people who feel neglected or wrongfully treated are the ones that steel the most at their workplace... I don't know if thats true, but it does make sense. Happy people usually don't commit crimes... unless their happiness is chemically provoked :P
ANY military institution that lets goddamn NINETEEN THOUSAND PIECES OF HARDWARE EQUIPMENT to be stolen,
.... well im speechless .... i cant even find analogies.
Read radical news here
on a related note, does anyone wanna buy a box of paperclips?
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
No one is saying that stuff walking away is a good thing, but 19+ thousand items at about $6.00 (est) average per item is typical office flow.
Listen, workers often bring things "into" work that are not counted, and some bring things back. I wouldn't even call it "quid pro quo," I'd call it humans working as humans do. We all do it, nothing bad mind you, I'll burn a DVD of stuff and bring it to work. I'll use my laptop because the company I may be working doesn't want to buy me one if I don't need it.
We are not machines, humans become "part" of the organizations to which they belong, and without malice "communal" supplies and things just get used.
Also, in a large technology environment, there is so much stuff that either gets tossed or walks. Think about keyboards, how many people order a cordless keyboard/mouse for their PCs? Well, what happens to the OEM keyboard/mouse? I'll tell you, it sits in a closet until it gets tossed or walks.
We setup a big data center a number of years back, we ordered 300 Dell servers, each and every damn one came with a keyboard and a mouse. We had a small mountain of brand-new mice and keyboards we didn't know what to do with. Dell would ship without them, and we couldn't get rid of them. So, we left them in a pile, and about 50% walked away.
Then there are hard disks, you upgrade a 100G hard disk to a 250G hard disk, 250g to 500g, what do you do with the old ones? They, too, sit in a closet. They have "book" value but no actual usable value. Computers, jeez, you can't get rid of them, but after 18 months they have "book" value but no practical resale value. It costs more in man-power to dispose of a 2 years old computer than it does to buy a new one. So it sits in a corner or a closet until someone asks "will that be missed?" and the response is "its just taking up space, I know nothing."
Your "human community" will use these things. The books will show a loss, but no real loss has occurred. Bonus! You get to deduct the loss, blame pilfering, and in the end stuff useless to organization stops taking up space and gets used, employees are better off, and there's room in the closets.
This is actually the best way. If they "gave" it to the employees, it would mean paperwork and taxes. This way, its just "lost" so sad. Everyone knows it, everyone does it, and this article is just a CYA piece.
Steal $120,000 from a local bank and see how many years in jail you end up with.
The next time some physicist is accused of misplacing (or selling) secret data, just remember this. NRL isn't just some lab somewhere, it's a military lab. While I'm sure this guy didn't want to go selling secrets anywhere, taking old hard drives can lose some scientists their jobs very easily.
...to check if your boss is one of the people making use of the 'loophole' before going to report on him ;=)
He wasn't in on it. I think it was more of an issue of my boss not wanting it to come down on his head. Safer to just play dumb about the whole thing than to actually acknowledge that there's a problem.
This guy's the limit!
Hard drives are now $6.00? What did he grab? The MFM lying around? The drum over in the corner?
The average estimated value of each item was $6.09. OK, what is a hard disk worth?
I have 200G ATA hard disk, what is it worth? Seriously, what is it worth? It has two values, the "book" value which you use for accounting and things like insurance, and you have the "functional" value. The functional value is nothing, zip, nada. It was upgraded to a 500G gig. I don't need to 200G hard disk, there no point in putting it into a system as it uses more power than it is worth. I can get a "green" drive with 2 to 4 times the storage that will cost me less in a year of electricity.
For me, I'll keep it in case I need to build a test system. For a big organization, it is actually best to let it "walk away" and take the deduction for loss.
"were talking 'military spec' pencils"
I know you're joking, but I was thinking something similar. Could it be ex-military spec junk hardware?. It could just be junk hardware that's getting thrown out (over a 10 year period), but is not officially signed off as allowed to be taken home as junk. From the paper trail it would look like the junk was still owned. Plus if people leave the organisation who allowed others to take some old junk home, then it would be hard to prove it was given away as rubbish. The paperwork would say it was still owned.
Considering how they are (only) now starting to take security a lot more seriously, I'm wondering if they are making an example of this person, who's basically got a house and/or garage full of junk?. Plus a system admin working for them, would probably get access to a lot of junk old hardware. It could just be old rubbish, but to paranoid non-technical types, who are looking for demons to fear everywhere, they would see it as wrong, rather than just seeing some engineer collecting a lot of interesting looking rubbish, before it hits the rubbish bins.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
I am sysadmin in a pharmaceutical company, and the Parent is correct.
We have 3 DELL 2600 servers with Dual CPU Xeon cpu, SCSI raid5, 4GB RAM ready to make their final trip to the dumpster.
We cannot use them anymore for plant systems because they are obsolete and out of support.
They are too big and noisy to use as test systems (as opposed to the 2U 2650s that we are going to keep just for that).
I would love to have even one of those machines in my basement, but it is not going to happen.
Corporate policy forbids employees from taking or even buying obsolete equipment.
In the beginning it was allowed, but someone once abused the system really badly, so now there has to be a documented paper trail for the destruction of all things going the the digital eternity.
We are going to try and give them away to a charity or school because it hurts to see those perfectly good machines except the disks) destroyed. But if we can't find anyone willing to take them, they will be destroyed. :(
If you end up in jail you're doing it wrong.
What you do is make LOTs of 120k loans even if you know they will never be repaid.
Then you get a big bonus etc for doing so well. The bonus could be 120K?
When stuff goes bad, you say "But everyone was doing it too". And everyone else nods their head in agreement.
Worst....
Whats the value of 100 32 gig disks?
Now whats the value of the shelf space they are sitting on.
Whats the value of that shelf space over a year? two years? 3 years?
If you are never going to use the drives or sell them, then they are worthless. Worst, they prevent you from using the space you have, which could store things that are going to be used soon, or NEED to be retained.
At worst, taking home 10 or even the whole 100 32 gig disks, makes room for the retiring 250 GB disks as they come out of machines.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
When I worked at CompUSA (yeah, I know...), they prevented this kind of thing by locking up everything of value. A standard employee could easily put something off the floor into a bag and leave with it, but anything sized small that has a value (cameras, phones, mp3 players, laptops, etc) that could be smuggled out would be locked up. There were different levels of keys, but it was still exclusive (one interesting thing I legitimately learned was that my keys worked at other stores, big loophole).
I would imagine that the Apple store isn't too different, if they trust their entire floor staff to access of these products, well they truly do Think Different.
In the neighborhood that I grew up in, the neighborhood kids would often ride around on their bikes on trash day, looking for interesting stuff that had been thrown out. Most of the residents just ignored us, but occasionally, you'd get someone yelling "hey! stay out of my trash!", for reasons that at the time weren't totally clear to me. Of course, given that we sometimes found pornography, or on one memorable occasion, a printing plate with the image of a dollar bill on it, I can see why some of the neighbors might be nervous.
I know of a combustion lab at a state university in NJ that wouldn't turn down a donation. Our lab advisor would rather use his money to make sure his grad students can eat rather than buy equipment that we don't absolutely need. It's actually been good for us because we've been forced to come up with creative solutions ourselves, rather than just buy equipment that would make the job easier. I'd understand if you turn down a cold-call beg for donations, but hey - it couldn't hurt to ask.
Watch out; the Russians are going to somehow get their hands on a hard drive containing data on submarine magnetohydrodynamic propulsion, adapt it to a (slightly) larger Typhoon-class sub, and confuse the hell out of Naval sonar techs with singing.
I have actually worked on disposing old IT equipment in the military, so I can tell you for a fact that this speculation is wrong.
All computers and IT equipment (down to mice and thumb drives) are tracked on a company's property book. When the item comes up for life cycle replacement, it is wiped and turned into the Property Book Office. Everything that was ever on a property book has to be turned in this way, regardless of depreciation. A commander can write off a certain amount, but since it is always a challenge to stay under the limit, they in practice never throw stuff in a closet to be taken home by some IT dude.
Anyways, after the equipment gets turned in, it goes to the Defense Reutilization and Marketing Service. While this stuff sometimes shows up in auctions later on, realistically anything that can still be used gets sent to an ally (usually Iraq or Afghanistan these days) as military/civil service aid.
Military contractors, on the other hand, are a whole different ball of wax. You want to see some waste, allow me to introduce you to Honeywell.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
Notmysig