“MISSING” LOS ALAMOS DISKS NEVER GONE?

“The pre­sumed miss­ing com­puter disks that forced the secu­rity shut­down and polit­i­cal uproar at Los Alamos National Lab, appear to not be miss­ing at all,” accord­ing to a New Mexico tele­vi­sion sta­tion.

KRQE News 13 has learned that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has con­cluded the disks, thought to have con­tained nuclear weapon secrets, were never miss­ing.
In early July, lab offi­cials announced that the disks were miss­ing, prompt­ing a mas­sive and unprece­dented secu­rity shut­down and con­se­quent inves­ti­ga­tion. Nearly two dozen sci­en­tists and admin­is­tra­tors were placed on leave and vir­tu­ally all lab oper­a­tions were sus­pended.
Now, sources tell KRQE News 13s Larry Barker that FBI inves­ti­ga­tors have con­cluded the disks in ques­tion, gen­er­ally called ‘Classified Removable Electronic Media’ or C.R.E.M., were never miss­ing and may have never existed in the first place.
The cler­i­cal error appears to cen­ter around the bar codes used to track clas­si­fied mate­r­ial. The bar code stick­ers that would have been found on the sup­posed miss­ing disks were instead dis­cov­ered still affixed to their orig­i­nal printed forms.
The FBI declined com­ment on this report and the lab says it will release the find­ings of its inves­ti­ga­tion when appro­pri­ate.
Much of the lab’s clas­si­fied work is still shut down pend­ing the out­come of a Department of Energy review.
The shut down has called into ques­tion the University of Californias man­age­ment of the facil­ity, made long­time polit­i­cal sup­port­ers ques­tion lab prac­tices and has cost tax­pay­ers mil­lions of dollars.

“It may be that what we have here is a false pos­i­tive — the sys­tem says some­thing is miss­ing when it is not,” Sen. Pete Domenici (R-​​NM), Los Alamos’ top defender in Congress, tells the AP. “And just as if it were a med­ical test, it is bet­ter to find out the inven­tory was wrong than that the disks were actu­ally miss­ing. But this entire sit­u­a­tion only rein­forces that we need to improve the inven­tory sys­tem.“
THERE’S MORE: The the­ory among Los Alamos sci­en­tists now is that “some­one tried to save time by cre­at­ing the paper­work for the disks before they were actu­ally made.“
“You can imag­ine peo­ple try­ing to stream­line things,” said astro­physi­cist Charles Keller tells the Times. “Maybe the infor­ma­tion fit on fewer disks than was antic­i­pated. I’m not say­ing that’s how it hap­pened, but it’s what peo­ple do when they’re try­ing to make their work run smoothly.”

August 11th, 2004 | Los Alamos and Labs | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.