CQ HOMELAND SECURITY
May 6, 2008 – 7:48 p.m.
State Department Says ‘Missing’ Laptops Have Been Located
By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor
The State Department says it has found the 400 laptops that CQ reported were unaccounted for last week.
A senior official in the department’s Office of the Inspector General, speaking only on a not-for-attribution basis, acknowledged that managers in the Diplomatic Security service had lost track of the computers, which are destined for friendly foreign police services.
But he said that they were located “within 24 hours” after CQ reported them missing over the weekend.
“We didn’t start looking until Monday morning, and found that this may have been an internal management count (problem),” the official said. “By the end of the afternoon they found out they were in Springfield or Herndon or wherever they’re stored before they go overseas.”
On May 2, a spokesman in the State Department’s press office referred an inquiry about the missing laptops to the inspector general.
But on Monday the department said, “we have no indication of hundreds of laptops missing.”
“They have been accounted for and readied for shipment,” said spokesperson Joanne Moore, in a prepared statement.
Moore further said “we have not identified any missing laptops containing classified” or personal, data.”
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,” CQ/Homeland Security reported on May 2.
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.
Streufert further warned that the inspector general’s audit would show that “we haven’t done well in the laptop department,” according to an official at the meeting.
There was also a significant deficiency in the security of Internet technology systems existed, Streufert said.
State Department Says ‘Missing’ Laptops Have Been Located
The official who chaired the meeting, Christopher Flaggs, the department’s deputy chief financial officer, also asked the more than two dozen officials present about the security of laptops in the possession of private contractors.
None of the officials knew whether the State Department required them to be encrypted to protect classified information, according to a person who attended the meeting.
Storm Warning
CQ also reported May 2 that 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.”
Duda 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, which was subsequently stolen.
The senior IG official said Duda’s remarks were not as dire as they sounded.
But Flaggs warned that the department’s weak controls over personally identifiable information in laptops and other systems could lead to being branded 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 told CQ last week.
One official, speaking on terms of anonymity, told CQ that the department’s report that the laptops had been found still meant that they had been “lost” for a period of time, “no matter where they were.”
“I would expect many of the laptops to be ‘found’ in the sense that they may not have actually left a State Department facility,” the official said, “But if they don’t know where they are, that is bad management, and they may as well have disappeared,”
Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.
Comments
"By the end of the afternoon they found out they were in Springfield or Herndon or wherever they're stored before they go overseas." Wherever they are stored before they go overseas? How in Sam Hill can this statement be considered a reliable and accurate accounting of the location ot these computers?
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