"We're from the government, and ..."

[unixronin]

"... we're apparently incapable of even helping ourselves, except to the contents of your wallet."

According to a report released by the Inspector General of the Justice Department yesterday, over a 44 month period starting in 2002 the FBI reported 160 laptops and 160 weapons as lost or stolen.

"[...] one of the laptops stolen from the FBI's Quantico Laboratory Division contained "names, addresses, and telephone numbers of FBI personnel."  Others contained unknown information that could be classified.  Most of the missing laptops were lost, not stolen."

Comments

[arasirsul.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure how I feel about this one. I mean, this is actually an improvement over the 400+ laptops they lost in a notably shorter amount of time (and an improvement over firearms lost, as well, and while the laptop figure from the earlier study is the FBI plus a couple other small organizations, the firearms figures in both studies are FBI alone...)

Averaging the loss of three laptops and three firearms a month is not a good thing, but the sick thing is it's better than what they _were_ doing, so at least the trend is in the right direction...

-JDF

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Yeah. It's an improvement, but it's still not good. And I find it disturbing that they don't even know if there was any classified information on the laptops. Isn't the whole point of classified information that you're supposed to carefully control where it goes and who has access to it?

[juuro.livejournal.com]

Well... I use classified information in my job. There are some classes of information that I sign for that I have this and that item in my possession, but then I can have a copy on a CD in my safe and another on the (encrypted) disk of the laptop. It is completely up to me to remember where I have copies of the items.

Then there are some classes of information that never leave the specific computers; only sanitized excerpts do. And guess how the sanitized excerpts are exported? I connect my classified laptop to the classified LAN and squirt the file over there. Only later, when (and if) I remember and feel like it, I record the existence of the exported file in the logbook.