National Security Issues

Last week Los Alamos started getting in trouble and ended up being shut down. This week the news that Sandy Berger is under investigation for violation of security.  His lawyer and some politicians are making light of it saying it was “inadvertent” and/or “sloppiness”.  For anyone that has worked with classified data this excuse is like a high school student saying the boogie-man ate my homework.  You would be skeptical if they said their dog ate it but it’s out of the realm of possibility for anyone to believe even for a second the boogie-man story.

Anyway… a memo just “came down” to inventory all our removable storage media.  I’ve worked here over 2.5 years and this is the first time this sort of thing has occurred.  I’ve had to do complete inventories with checks on all the markings, etc. before but never just removable storage media.  I had an administrative assistant ask me to open my safe and do the inventory with her.  No big deal–10 minutes out of my day.  I only had one hard disk and it took longer to log my entry into and out of the safe than to do the inventory.

Does anyone not believe this is going to be the last straw for the University of California management contract at Los Alamos?  It’s up for renewal.  Battelle wants that contract, so do others.  Battelle might not get it but I’m nearly certain UC is going to be exceedingly hard pressed to hold on to it.

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