Subject: [NEXTEL-1] DOE probe of lab to consider national security

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 23 May 2004 16:07:36 -0400

Posted on Sat, May. 22, 2004

DOE probe of lab to consider national security

By James W. Brosnan

SCRIPPS-MCCLATCHY NEWS SERVICE

WASHINGTON - The Department of Energy is sending a team to Los Alamos National Laboratory to investigate another case of a missing classified computer disk.
Rep. Tom Udall, D-Santa Fe, said he was assured that the missing disk "does not contain nuclear weapons data."
Officials with the New Mexico lab said in a written statement that the disk's absence "in no way constitutes a compromise of national security."
But a spokesman for DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration, Anton Franklin, said, "We're sending a team to look at those very issues."
He said the National Nuclear Security administrator, Linton Brooks, had directed an independent review team to assess the incident, the lab's response and the lab's procedures for handling and destroying classified media.
The lab's administrator, the University of California, admitted Thursday that a classified disk -- it did not specify the type -- turned up missing during an effort to verify the lab's destruction of 50,000 pieces of removable computer media, leaving roughly 33,000 pieces still at the lab.
Lab spokesman Kevin Roark said that on Monday several classified-matter custodians were conducting a re-inventory of classified media to check on the results of the destruction efforts when they discovered "a single accounting discrepancy."
Lab and DOE officials did agree that the discovery highlights the need to move quickly to the goal of a diskless computer system at the lab, in which scientists would work only with a monitor, keyboard and mouse.
On May 7, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham announced a goal of moving to a diskless environment in five years.
Not fast enough, said Danielle Brian, executive director of a watchdog group, the Project on Government Oversight. She scoffed at the lab's assertion that the missing disk does not compromise national security.
"The lab can try to spin it however they want," said Brian. "Classified data is missing from Los Alamos yet again."
She noted that in 2000, two computer hard drives were reported missing for several weeks before mysteriously being discovered in a room that had already been searched. Some 200 computers could not be accounted for in 2002 and ten disks were reported missing last year.
The security problems at the laboratory contributed to a DOE decision last year to open the contract to run the lab up for bids.
The UC contract expires in 2005.

http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/news/8731243.htm?1c

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