- The Los Alamos National Laboratory, the nation's most
important nuclear weapons lab, lost another hard disk drive filled with
classified information, once again throwing a spotlight on lab officials
who have been trying to re-emerge from years of scandals and mismangement.
-
- The latest episode came to light Thursday, after Los
Alamos admitted that, since a Monday inventory check, its custodians hadn't
been able to find a "classified removable electronic media,"
or CREM -- disks and drives inscribed with the country's secrets.
-
- A Los Alamos press release played down the incident,
calling it "a single accounting discrepancy (that) in no way constitutes
a compromise of national security." Los Alamos has tens of thousands
of removable hard drives, discs and memory sticks. When one can't be found,
it's usually because of something innocent, like "administrative errors"
or outdated machinery. But lab critics were hearing none of it.
-
- "Can't they ever get anything right?" said
Los Alamos security consultant-turned-whistleblower Glenn Walp. "They
take the same old corporate line: 'It's not us, it's the system.' How refreshing
it would be if someone at that place would have the backbone to admit they
screwed up."
-
- Computer security has been particularly problematic for
the lab. In 2001, two missing hard drives packed with nuclear weapon designs
were found behind a Los Alamos copy machine. More CREMs went missing --
and were subsequently found -- in January 2002, November 2002 and January
2003. Last December, lab director Pete Nanos put several employees on "paid
investigative leave" after 10 CREMs vanished.
-
- Two weeks ago, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham called
for Los Alamos and the other nuclear labs to do away with removable drives
and disks altogether by 2009, moving to a "diskless environment"
instead.
-
- But Danielle Brian, executive director of the nuclear
watchdog Project on Government Oversight, said five years is too long to
wait. Abraham's initiative "should begin immediately, with Los Alamos
as the top priority," she said. "Going medialess will make this
problem go away overnight."
-
- Los Alamos has reduced its CREM stockpile by nearly 60
percent. A nice move, Brian said, but not enough.
-
- "There's still a lot of stuff for them to lose,"
she said.
-
- © Copyright 2004, Lycos, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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