Lost and Found at the DEA

A new report from the Department of Justice has good news and bad news. The good news is that the DEA had “a 50 percent reduction in the frequency with which laptops are lost and stolen” since 2002. Of course they can’t actually figure out what was on all those stolen computers, unlike the 160 laptops the FBI has lost or had stolen during the last 4 years — they think at least 10 of those actually had sensitive information on them. It is known that at least one of the missing DEA computers did in fact have sensitive data on informants. That’s the kind of thing that could get people killed. For those keeping count, there are 231 laptops missing from the DEA in the last 5 years. New policies include encryption of some data, but frankly this is one of those cases where the best security is to minimize the data that can be breached in the first place.

Oh, but that’s not the bad news. The bad news is that even though they are losing fewer computers, they are losing more guns: 22 lost and 69 stolen. Many of the weapon thefts could have been prevented by simply following policies already in place, which is frankly inexcusable.

This was a follow-up to a study done in 2002, when they found a total of over 775 weapons and 400 laptop computers missing from various Department of Justice agencies — including the DEA. If you are curious, here’s the official executive summary from the OIG.

Maybe things work differently at the Department of Justice, but I think I would be fired if I lost a laptop full of company data, or if my own stupidity in the workplace caused a firearm to be stolen. Mistakes happen, sure. But sometimes you can’t afford to make mistakes at all. “Oh gee, I’m sorry!” won’t put an outed investigation back on track, or bring back a human being killed with a stolen gun.