The drive is missing from the Archives facility in College Park, Md., a Washington suburb. The drive was lost between October 2008 and March 2009 and contained 1 terabyte of data — enough material to fill millions of books.
A Republican committee aide who was at the inspector general’s briefing said the Archives had been converting the Clinton administration information to a digital records system when the hard drive went missing.
The aide, who was not authorized to be quoted by name, said the hard drive was left on a shelf and unused for an uncertain period of time. When the employee tried to resume work, the hard drive was missing.
Did it go something like this? “Oh, I’ll just set this 1TB drive with the personal identity information of top officials and sensitive logs over here on this open shelf for a while and go work on other things…”. Not exactly the sort of risk calculation you would expect in the National Archives. Maybe they do not have a high rate of technology theft, but even so the person using the drive knew the value of the contents. I bet they still keep valuable papers under strict lock and environmental controls.
I often wonder why the lights are left on all night in office buildings in America. It seems like a colossal waste of energy. The cost should be offset by more intelligent detection and control systems, which have many uses beyond simple energy savings, as demonstrated here by Wroclaw University of Technology students in Poland:
Instead of fireworks displays, which are so 17th century, the cities could come alive with annual building light shows. Buildings could also give emergency messages, or be used to indicate temperature and weather change. The energy being burned every hour of every night could be put to so many more uses. The technology is ready:
According to the police, a lab technician with the Swiss National Center for Influenza in Geneva had travelled to Zurich to collect eight ampoules, five of which were filled with the H1N1 swine flu virus. The samples were to be used to develop a test for swine flu infections.
The containers were hermetically sealed and cooled with dry ice. However, it seems the dry ice was not packed correctly and it melted during the journey. The gas coming from the containers then built up too much pressure and the ampoules exploded, as the train was pulling into a station.
Throughout our careers as scientific glassblowers, we have witnessed several incidents involving cryogens that have caused injury to personnel. By sharing these experiences, it is our hope that we will all have a greater understanding and respect for cryogenic liquids.
The obvious solution in this case would be a pressure alarm requirement for containers, especially those with dry ice that are known to have explosive risks.
You know that Garmin satnav you use to find the nearest Thai place when the in-laws are visiting? If you were the Navy brass, that should have scared you to death. The Mac on your kid’s bedroom desk should have scared you. Every time electronics got smaller, cheaper and more efficient, the carrier became more of a death trap. Every time stealth tech jumped another step, the carrier was more obviously a bad idea. Smaller, cooler-running engines: another bad sign for the carrier. Every single change in technology in the past half a century has had “Stop building carriers!” written all over it. And nobody in the navy brass paid any attention.
The lesson here is the same one all of you suckers should have learned from watching the financial news this year: the people at the top are just as dumb as you are, just meaner and greedier. And that goes for the ones running the US surface fleet as much as it does for the GM or Chrysler honchos. Hell, they even look the same. Take that Wagoner ass who just got the boot from GM and put him in a tailored uniform and he could walk on as an admiral in any officer’s club from Guam to Diego Garcia. You have to stop thinking somebody up there is looking out for you.
Remember that one sentence, get it branded onto your arm: “Ships currently have no defense against a ballistic missile attack.”
Recommendations are found in the analysis of middle-east combat:
The difference between the Israeli navy and ours is simple: the Israelis learned their lesson and switched to smaller, lighter missile craft. No more ocean-going muscle cars to act like giant magnetized targets. The newer Israeli boats are small enough that when you lose one, like they did in the 2006 war to land-based Hezbollah surface to surface missiles, you don’t suffer 100 casualties.
Got that? No more muscle cars. This is amazing stuff to think about as I find Americans who continue to emphasize “go big” as the best measure of success. The clear lesson is to go efficient, or maybe even to go small, or face a predictable catastrophe.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
