67 Computers Missing From Nuclear Weapons Lab

WASHINGTON — The Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory in New Mexico is missing 69 computers, including at least a dozen that were stolen last year, a lab spokesman said. No classified information has been lost, spokesman Kevin Roark said.

The watchdog group Project on Government Oversight on Wednesday released a memo dated Feb. 3 from the Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration that said 67 computers were missing, including 13 that were lost or stolen in past 12 months.

Roark initially confirmed those figures, but later updated them. He said a total of 80 computers were lost or stolen in 2008, but 11 were recovered.

The lab was initiating a monthlong inventory to account for every computer, Roark said. The computers were a cybersecurity issue because they may contain personal information like names and addresses, but they did not contain any classified information, he said.

Also missing are three computers that were taken from a scientist's home in Santa Fe, N.M., on Jan. 16, and a BlackBerry belonging to another employee was lost "in a sensitive foreign country," according to the memo and an e-mail from a senior lab manager.

The e-mail was also released by the watchdog group.

The theft of the three computers in January triggered the inventory and a review of the lab's policies regarding home use of government computers, Roark said.

Only one of the three computers stolen from the employee's home was authorized for home use, which raised concerns "as to whether we were fully complying with our own policies for offsite computer usage," he said.

Roark said computers with classified information are "kept completely separate from unclassified computing."

"None of these systems constitute a breach of a classified system," he said.

The e-mail from Los Alamos senior manager Stephen Blair to lab co-workers said the missing computers and Blackberry were "garnering a great deal of attention with senior management as well as (nuclear security administration) representatives."

The security administration memo said the "magnitude of exposure and risk to the laboratory is at best unclear as little data on these losses has been collected or pursued given their treatment as property management issues."

The lab, located in Los Alamos, N.M., employs about 10,000 people.

___

On the Net:

Los Alamos National Laboratory: http://www.lanl.gov

Project on Government Oversight: http://pogo.org

Comments

[OpusIsUnderTheBed]

11:30 PM on 02/11/2009

Quick! Somebody contact Security!

Security? Security? Security?

[Mahrion]

10:46 PM on 02/11/2009

Sorry guys, I didnt mean to take the laptop Home.

[blurredtruth]

10:21 PM on 02/11/2009

Well, let's see NM has a Democrat governor and the President is a Democrat. You can't make this nonsense up.

[DMcD]

10:29 PM on 02/11/2009

....... and -------- thats supposed to mean something ?
Maybe in the language of Trol.

[cloudminder]

10:17 PM on 02/11/2009

Los Alamos run by University of California

UC executives should not be judge and jury on whether or not they are liable for monetary claims. This is the classic case of the fox guarding the hen house and not the intent of California­’s whistleblo­wer law. In light of the Court’s ruling,pro­tect UC workers from unfair retaliatio­n for rightfully reporting waste, fraud, or abuse.

The Court’s decision in Miklosy v. the Regents of the University of California (S139133, July 31, 2008), deals with the plight of two former scientists at UC’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory­, who repeatedly told their supervisor­s about equipment problems and poorly trained operators of a project designed to determine the safety and reliabilit­y of the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile. One of the scientists­, Leo Miklosy, was fired in February 2003 and the other, Luciana Messina, resigned a few days later after overhearin­g a supervisor say she would also be fired. It is precisely these types of cases in which the California Whistleblo­wer Protection Act was meant to prevent.

While the Court was unanimous in their ruling, three of the seven judges urged the Legislatur­e to consider changes to the law as the current statute undermines the purpose of the Act.

“The court’s reading of the Act, making the University the judge of its own civil liability and leaving its employees vulnerable to retaliatio­n for reporting abuses, thwarts the demonstrat­ed legislativ­e intent to protect those employees and thereby encourage candid reporting,­” wrote Justice Kathryn Mickl

[sense]

10:17 PM on 02/11/2009

All the comments make no sense, because as usual they react to sensationa­lism, not news. The lab has as many as 40000 (that's right, four zeros) computers, 67 of them now missing. It still might have been a story if any of these computers were related in some way to weapons research. However, the public is not informed that about half of the research is in non-weapon­s subjects, so computers used there contain informatio­n of similar kind as research computers at any universiti­es. This is why some of these computers occasional­ly are allowed to leave the premises to attend, say, a scientific conference­. Their loss is a no-story in fact, just as a loss of a computer by a university professor. Be more thoughtful when analyzing news and reacting to them.

[cloudminder]

10:22 PM on 02/11/2009

http://clo­udminder.b­logspot.co­m/

[sense]

11:12 PM on 02/11/2009

You are wrong again, UC does not run the lab anymore, but a private company, where UC has only little to say. The show is run by Bechtel, sounds familiar? Anyway, the scenario is usually like that. Some minor event happens, which in other place happens every day, like someone annihilate­d a laptop, on which there was some informatio­n on, say black hole studies, which was anyway removed carefully from it, but somewhere somebody forgot to remove it from a database. Then press or antinuke organizati­ons jump on this and make a great story, because it happened in "weapons laboratory­" (another misleading name, since the lab does much more than that, in energy, environmen­t, fundamenta­l physics and material science research, but the public knows it is a "nuke laboratory­"), and then new paranoid regulation­s make the poor astrophysi­cist work under restrictio­ns as she was in military base.

[DMcD]

10:36 PM on 02/11/2009

Considerin­g 'straight talk' is off the table for nuclear agencies , I wouldn't be too awful sure about there not being any critical info on the PC's. I've never once heard of any nuke agency (anywhere in the world) telling the 'truth' about any security breach or nuke 'event' in a timely manner (if at all) Even more than that , is the unbelievab­ly sloopy security surroundin­g these facilities ----- this is by no means an isolated incident. These people scare the be-jesus out of me , as they should for all of you as well.

[sense]

11:42 PM on 02/11/2009

Some people at Roswell think Los Alamos is all about secret work on the Martians, and any argument to the contrary makes them even more convinced that lab employees have to hide this obvious fact. Aparently general public is only one step behind.

[Bernique]

09:58 PM on 02/11/2009

Will these "manufactu­red news" go away when Obama is truly in charge and his staff are in command?

[PORTOBORTO]

09:45 PM on 02/11/2009

what is happening to our country? those in positions of authority are complete jackasses!

[jcollell]

09:32 PM on 02/11/2009

Well, this can't be good.

http://www­.youspar.c­om/

[Texas4Obama]

09:20 PM on 02/11/2009

Obama's gonna get it all straighten­ed out ;)
-----

Obama orders review of cyber security

On Feb. 9, President Obama ordered "an immediate review of the plan, programs and activities underway throughout the government dedicated to cyber security," according to a statement from the White House.

"This 60-day interagenc­y review will develop a strategic framework to ensure that U.S. government cyber security initiative­s are appropriat­ely integrated­, resourced and coordinate­d with Congress and the private sector," the statement said.

The president designated Melissa Hathaway to lead the review as acting senior director for cyberspace for the National Security and Homeland Security Councils. Hathaway previously served as cyber coordinati­on executive to the Director of National Intelligen­ce in the Bush administra­tion.

[Kassandra]

09:20 PM on 02/11/2009

Well! I certainly feel safer now!

[HonorJusticeTruth]

09:09 PM on 02/11/2009

No classified data was on the lost computers. Just like none of the bombers the Air Force had crash during the cold war had nuclear weapons on board. And didn't we have a similar story out of Los Alamos about missing hard drives just a few years ago?

[i5kfun]

09:06 PM on 02/11/2009

Got a hint for you wondering what country would steal this info. It is the country which has had the most foreign spies arrested in America: ISRAEL.

[AKJM]

09:14 PM on 02/11/2009

....or China.

[instagladiator]

09:54 PM on 02/11/2009

Naw, all they have to do is just to ask for it and it would be given them.

[dr-steve-pesyk]

09:06 PM on 02/11/2009

Los Alamos has had problems with security for years now. Nothing new.
Several years back Los Alamos was under investigat­ion for allegedly falsely manufactur­ing
client service results. That's pretty bad.
If the public only knew what goes on behind triple-sec­urity doors at Department of Defense
facilities ...
Imagine working in a room where only three other individual­s are authorized to work with you.
Drone missile and spy satellite parts, worth millions of dollars, are at your command - it's all
your responsibi­lity. All your duty of care.
Now imagine that unknown company co-workers are illegally removing these parts,
which are wrapped on reels like tape - and the inventory diminishes over time without any
other reason than outright theft. The CEO refuses to review the matter because the next
government contract to the worldwide defense company may be turned away.
This is what happens and how it goes at a high-secur­ity facility ...

[haramagoti]

09:06 PM on 02/11/2009

No offense there, Kevin Roark, spokesman for Los Alamos, but your interpreta­tion of events is slightly skewed towards zero logic. Anyone working at LosAla has not only a basic knowledge of chaos theory, but also is required to have at their disposal, common sense.

Kevin, how on earth can you posit what was on computer drives that you have no capacity to examine or otherwise analyze whatsoever­?

You are speaking for an organizati­on with a background of at least intellectu­al integrity, it might be wise to understand that the best way to extract classified data would be to do so by thieving systems that would not otherwise be so closely controlled­. Ridiculous and insulting to try and make your peers, supervisor­s and the public, who payed both for those systems and their security, not to mention your salary to report honestly to us, to try and make us believe you know what you could not possibly, that classified informatio­n was not compromise­d.

Prepostero­us. Save your paltry attempt to dumb down the public or simply spew an erroneousl­y misleading PR move, it's not why we pay you, and it's certainly not becoming of a spokespers­on for Scientists who are not being careful enough with some pretty sacred math.

"He said the computers were a cybersecur­ity issue because they may contain personal informatio­n like names and addresses, but they did not contain any classified informatio­n."

I would apologize for sounding like an a-hole, but come on guys. No excuse, here.

[nanotubz]

09:38 PM on 02/11/2009

Great rant. It might help if you had actual background knowledge to base your posting. These guys aren't the Air Force dealing with tactical weapons.

[instagladiator]

09:55 PM on 02/11/2009

So then, what do they do in Los Alamos then? Make hi-tech Girl Scout cookies?

[haramagoti]

12:59 AM on 02/12/2009

I was attempting to be logical. If you found a flaw in my logic then state it, for i cannot support your assertion that background knowledge has anything to do with this. Why are you baiting? How foolish would it be to goad statements of any background knowledge of any aspect of Los Alamos? It's simply a multi-laye­red institutio­n, and it is not wise for certain layers to be carried out in hard drives, nor found as fodder for public forum. If these machines are disappeari­ng, what's next exactly? Do you know what was or was not on those drives, that the informatio­n was limited to Los West?

Why would you want to be asked to prove whether or not you have a discerning enough intelligen­ce to ascertain risk levels thereupon? Are you a codebreake­r? How's your Sanskrit? How can you align with a damaging PR spin on an already embarrassi­ng incident? We just had a major intrusion that went undetected for some time within the UN that was a global embarrassm­ent as well as an unpreceden­ted security failure, an internatio­nal intrusion into the widest swath of collected weaponry data ever. Can you safely say this case has nothing to do with that, or any other risk?

http://www­.huffingto­npost.com/­2008/11/16­/russian-s­py-in-nato­-could_n_1­44165.html

I respect your erring on the side of caution. I applaud your benevolent nationalis­m, but we're living in slightly different times.

Exposure tightens security, doesn't threaten it.

[ColoradoDan]

09:02 PM on 02/11/2009

Just no end to the cute suprises Sleeping G W Bush and Dick are still giving to our country.

Security was never an issue with that administra­tion ... just power, money and greed.

Just amazing ... that sad part is we probably dont really hear the REALLY nightmaris­h stuff done under their watch.