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Opinion
 

Staff Editorial

                        Robyn Morrow             Chris Elliott                        
                                               John Arterbury       Caitlin Cuppernull

It's amazing they can even find their office

At UH, losing your laptop is easy -- walk away from it for one second and it's disappeared. At most, you may lose some important documents and a good chunk of money, but at least you won't lose secrets about nuclear weapons. 

Unfortunately, this is not the case for the Energy Department as, once again, one of its offices has lost several laptops containing classified information about nuclear weapons.

The New York Times reported that 20 laptops were found missing by the Energy Department inspector general and that "this is the 13th time in a little over four years that the department has lost computers," and that at the beginning of the most recent audit it was missing 141 desktop computers. 

According to the New York Times, "a spokesman for the department, Craig Stevens, said Energy Secretary Samuel W. Bodman ‘recognizes that we need to manage this place better.' "

"Better" is an understatement. 

Losing such a large number of computers is not only unsafe and unprofessional, it also seems unlikely to happen if the office were living up to its duty. 

"The office involved in this breach has a special responsibility, tracking and countering efforts to steal bomb information. Its computers would have material on what the department knew about foreign operatives and efforts to steal sensitive information," according to the New York Times. 

It's ironic that an office created to track efforts to steal bomb information would lose computers containing bomb information. The office is doing a terrible job of, well, doing its job.

The department needs a serious overhaul of its security. Losing one computer containing classified information is unacceptable, and losing over 100 is just plain scary.