[Infowarrior] - Hundreds of Laptops Missing at State Department

[Richard Forno]

Hundreds of Laptops Missing at State Department, Audit Finds
By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor
http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?docID=hsnews-000002716318

Hundreds of employee laptops are unaccounted for at the U.S.  
Department of State, which conducts delicate, often secret, diplomatic  
relations with foreign countries, an internal audit has found.

As many as 400 of the unaccounted for laptops belong to the  
department’s Anti-Terrorism Assistance Program, according to officials  
familiar with the findings.

The program provides counterterrorism training and equipment,  
including laptops, to foreign police, intelligence and security forces.

Ironically, the Anti-Terrorism Assistance Program is administered by  
the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security (DS), which is  
responsible for the security of the department’s computer networks and  
sensitive equipment, including laptops, among other duties. It also  
protects foreign diplomats during visits here.

DS officials have been urgently dispatching vans around the bureau’s  
Washington-area offices to collect and register employee laptops, said  
department sources who could not speak on the record for fear of being  
fired.

The inventory sometimes strips DS investigators of their laptops for  
“days, or weeks,” they said.

The State Department’s Inspector General launched an audit of the  
equipment about three months ago. Only the first stage, or inventory  
of equipment, has been completed.

A State Department official referred all questions regarding laptop  
losses to the Inspector General.

A senior IG official, asking not to be identified, said he could “not  
comment on ongoing work.”

Nita M. Lowey , D-N.Y., who heads a House Appropriations subcommittee  
that oversees State Department operations, said she was concerned  
about the security revelations.

“The importance of safeguarding official laptops and office equipment  
containing sensitive information is not a new concern,” she said  
through a spokesman. “I intend to review the facts about this  
situation.”

“Unaccounted for” does not necessarily mean the laptops have been  
lost. But they are “missing” until they have been found or otherwise  
accounted for.

Auditors found that the department had lost track of $30 million worth  
of equipment, according to one official, “the vast majority of  
which . . . perhaps as much as 99 per cent,” was laptops.

Calculating that the average State Department laptop costs $3,000,  
another official said, hundreds, perhaps as many as a thousand, were  
missing. It could not be learned how many employees have been issued  
laptops.

On Feb. 6, the department’s Senior Assessment Team gathered at the  
State Department headquarters in Foggy Bottom to discuss the security  
of “personal identification information.”

The department’s official in charge of computer equipment, John  
Streufert, warned the more than two dozen officials present that the  
department did not have good records of its inventory.

A “significant deficiency” relating to laptops existed, Streufert  
said, according to a source who attended the meeting.

Mark Duda, a representative of the Inspector General’s office at the  
meeting, warned the managers that they needed to get on top of the  
equipment issue before it “blows up.” He said a scandal loomed akin to  
the one that engulfed the Veterans Administration in 2006, when news  
broke that a VA official had taken home a laptop with the personal  
records of 26 million veterans, where it was stolen.

The official who chaired the meeting, Christopher Flaggs, the  
department’s deputy chief financial officer, also warned that  
revelation of the laptop losses could develop into a “material  
weakness,” an accounting term-of-art that essentially means  
inventories are out of control.

“It’s the worst flaw you can have in management control,” one close  
observer of the State Department’s problems said.

It would have to alert the White House Office of Management and Budget  
(OMB) and Congress. There could be hearings, headlines, camera crews  
on the doorstep of State Department officials.

That’s what happened in 1999, when a laptop containing the names of  
foreign agents working for the U.S. government was stolen from the  
State Department.

The security of laptops has vexed federal officials, as well as  
private industry, for years. The CIA, FBI and other national security  
agencies have all lost significant numbers of laptops containing  
sensitive information.

More than a year ago, the administration’s Identity Theft Task Force  
warned of security vulnerabilities within the government’s Internet  
technology systems.

In May 2007, OMB had ordered all federal departments and agencies to  
“develop and implement a breach notification policy within 120 days.”

Hints of the State Department’s laptop losses first surfaced March 31  
in an anonymous post at an obscure Web site frequented by employees of  
the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, called Dead Men Working.

“We’re not talking about a missing laptop or two,” said a poster who  
identified himself as “Steve.”

“A Department-wide audit found hundreds of laptops unaccounted for and  
identified DS, now rushing to close the barn door before the scandal  
really breaks, as having the laxest control of any bureau in the  
agency,” Steve wrote.

John Naland, a retired diplomat who is president of the American  
Foreign Service Association, said the alleged losses were worrisome,  
and perplexing.

“If the missing ones might have contained classified data, this could  
be serious,” Naland said.

“At my last overseas post, we did not have any laptops,” Naland  
continued. “But we sure did an annual serial number physical inventory  
of computers. Sometimes our initial count came up with discrepancies,  
but then we remembered that we returned one to Washington or whatever  
and that cleared up the paperwork discrepancy.”

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein at cq.com.

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