Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

Sci-Tech Today:

What started with a bang has ended with a whimper. The U.S. Energy Department admitted late Friday that two allegedly "missing" secret computer disks that had triggered a major purge at one of the nation's premier nuclear weapons laboratories never existed in the first place.

But Linton Brooks, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said the University of California that manages Los Alamos National Laboratory Latest News about Los Alamos National Laboratory will see its fiscal 2004 fee reduced by 5.8 million dollars as punishment for security Latest News about Security lapses discovered at the northern New Mexico facility that gave birth to the U.S. nuclear bomb.

"Although multiple investigations have confirmed that the 'missing' disks never existed, the major weaknesses in controlling classified material revealed by this incident are absolutely unacceptable, and the University of California must be held accountable for them," Brooks said in a statement.

..

A high-level department delegation was dispatched to New Mexico to investigate, and heads soon started to roll.

As many as 19 laboratory employees, including 15 scientists who had access to the disks, had been placed on administrative leave.

Los Alamos Director Peter Nanos threatened massive layoffs Latest News about layoffs, saying, "If I have to restart the laboratory with 10 people, I will."

Eventually, four were fired for security breaches Latest News about security breaches, one chose to resign under the threat of termination and seven others received various formal reprimands.

Only by October were the scientists able to resume their full-scale work.

The confusion, it turns out, was created by inventory bar codes produced for computer disks that have never been written, a department official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

Yeah, this doesn't reek of another case about 5 years ago. You know, it blows me away how the government can go scalp collecting at the national labs every little while and it is a good thing, but the West Wing outs a CIA agent and two years pass and nothing has come of it at all. Of couse Capital S Science is just a tool of politics now, while Lynne Cheney holds in her hands a list of known traitors and even David Brooks has to blame the "Educated Class" (which I assume is the new Republican code word for the "Intellectual Elite"). This country has some very, very real problems.