At least 595 laptops and desktops belonging to the US Navy's
Pacific Command in Hawaii have been potentially lost or
compromised, according to an internal report that detailed the
service's inability to account for hundreds of computers, some of
which contained classified data.
The audit, conducted in July by the Naval Audit Service and
obtained last week by a defence industry trade magazine despite
Navy efforts to block its release, concluded that the mishap poses
a "threat to national security".
The report identified failures and breakdowns in the Navy's system
for tracking sensitive equipment deployed aboard Navy ships and
submarines - a system that remains largely paper-based and manual.
This is not the first time the military has lost computers
containing sensitive data. In August, two laptop computers
classified at the top-secret level disappeared from a sensitive
information facility run by the US Central Command at MacDill Air
Force Base in Florida.
The only reason those laptops were discovered to be missing was
that Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld had ordered investigators
to look into how plans for an invasion of Iraq had leaked to the
media.
Missing laptops and hard-drives have also stung the State
Department, the Department of Energy and even the US Federal Bureau
of Investigation in recent years.
In August, the Justice Department acknowledged that it could not
locate 400 laptops and 775 weapons belonging to the FBI and the
Drug Enforcement Agency. In addition, the classification level of
317 of the computers belonging to the FBI could not be determined.
Accountability problems often stem from the fact that individual
military and civilian agency officials are appointed as control or
accountability officers for a vast array of equipment that is
deployed for extended periods of time around the world.
In addition, the process of keeping tabs on equipment is often
determined by the individual officer assigned to manage the
hardware and is not subject to any departmental or government
standard.