Sunday, July 18, 2004

The Los Alamos National Laboratory has been shut down due to a number of disks containing classified nuclear information that are missing and unaccounted for. According to an article from Wired News, the director of the lab, George P. "Pete" Nanos, Jr., "'has suspended all operations at the laboratory,'" according to "an internal e-mail obtained by Wired News". On July 15, Nanos "suspended all classified work at Los Alamos, after officials there lost track of a pair of Zip disks and two external hard drives containing classified information." Los Alamos "is under fire for losing track of its classified material three times in the last eight months." According to Danielle Brian, the "executive director of the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight", Nanos said that "'these guys aren't taking security or safety seriously. I'm shutting this place down until they do.'" I hope that the site of the research and development of the first atomic bomb and the foremost nuclear lab in the US can get its shit together. (This story was heavily buried in the Washington Post, as one of the Nation In Brief articles on page A17.)

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