WASHINGTON - The Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory in New Mexico is missing 67 computers, including 13 that were lost or stolen in the past year. Officials said no classified information has been lost.
The watchdog group Project on Government Oversight released a memo dated Feb. 3 from the Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration outlining the loss of the computers.
Kevin Roark, a spokesman for Los Alamos, confirmed the computers are missing and said the lab is initiating a month long inventory process to account for every computer. He said the computers are a cybersecurity issue because they may contain personal information like names and addresses, but they do not contain any classified information.
Thirteen of the missing computers were lost or stolen in the past 12 months, including three computers taken from a scientist's home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on Jan. 16.
A BlackBerry belonging to another employee was lost "in a sensitive foreign country," according to the memo and an email from a senior manager in the lab's threat reduction directorate. The email also was released by the watchdog group.
The theft of the three computers in January triggered the inventory and a review of the lab's policies regarding home use of government computers, Roark said.
Only one of the three computers stolen from the employee's home was authorised for home use, which raised the question of "whether we were fully complying with our own policies for offsite computer usage," he said. Roark said computers with classified information are "kept completely separate from unclassified computing."
"None of these systems constitute a breach of a classified system," he said. The email from Los Alamos senior manager Stephen Blair to lab co-workers says the missing computers and BlackBerry, are "garnering a great deal of attention with senior management as well as (nuclear security administration) representatives."
The security administration memo said the "magnitude of exposure and risk to the laboratory is at best unclear as little data on these losses has been collected or pursued given their treatment as property management issues."
The lab, located in Los Alamos, New Mexico, employs about 10,000 people.
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