http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/16/national/16lab.html By KENNETH CHANG July 16, 2004 After the disappearance last week of two removable data storage devices, officials at Los Alamos National Laboratory yesterday announced a halt to classified research while they conduct an inventory of sensitive data. The halt affects the majority of work at Los Alamos, one of the nation's two nuclear weapons research laboratories. The loss of the storage devices was discovered July 7 during preparations to run an experiment in the laboratory's weapons physics division. The devices have not been found. The security lapse comes as the contract for managing Los Alamos goes out to bid. The University of California has run Los Alamos since it was founded during World War II, but the secretary of energy, Spencer Abraham, decided last year to seek competing bids after the discovery that some employees had spent thousands of dollars of laboratory funds on personal items. At the time, Mr. Abraham criticized the laboratory for "systematic management failure" in its business procedures. In a statement released yesterday, Mr. Abraham was similarly harsh on the laboratory's handling of classified information. "The investigation to date indicates widespread disregard of security procedures by laboratory employees," Mr. Abraham said. "This is absolutely unacceptable. While our first priority must be to locate the missing material, the government will insist that the University of California, which operates Los Alamos, ensures that the laboratory take strong measures to correct the systematic flaws that allowed this problem to occur." Conducting the inventory will take at least several days, said Kevin Roark, a laboratory spokesman. Employees involved in classified research will also repeat training on laboratory procedures and policies on handling sensitive data on floppy disks, CD-ROM's, memory cards and other removable data storage devices. Officials declined to say what kind of storage devices were missing or whether the data involved nuclear weapons research. The Department of Energy will soon release a request for proposals for running Los Alamos after the University of California's current contract ends in September 2005. _________________________________________ Help InfoSec News with a donation: http://www.c4i.org/donation.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Fri Jul 16 2004 - 01:25:37 PDT