Re: Biggest Incident This Week: Missing Hard Drives at Los Alamos

[fruitbat () NETSPACE ORG (Eric the Fruitbat)]

Said Benjamin Setnick <bjsetnic () SPRINTPARANET COM>, regarding the Los 
Alamos affair:
> The real question is, if disk drives containing classified information were
> stolen, why on earth would that information not be classified as well?
> Could there be a political reason behind the release of this information?

Political motivation, during an election year?  Nah, couldn't be.

But Benjamin's point got me thinking:  what if this is a kind of honeypot? 
Think about the difference between the following two scenarios:

A.  Drives are stolen.  DoE officials refuse to say what's on the disks, 
    but announce that the data are encrypted and would take fifteen years 
    to crack if you didn't know the passphrase, by which time the data 
    would all be obsolete anyway, so it's not really worth anyone's time 
    trying to find them.

B.  Drives are stolen.  DoE officials wring hands about vital nuclear 
    secrets stored on the disks, how compromising it all is, and fail to 
    mention any sort of encryption whatsoever, making it seem like all an 
    aspiring terrorist needs to do is make a bid for these things and the 
    rest is gravy.

Which do you think would generate more buzz in the underworld?  Which 
would result in actual attempts to acquire the drives -- attempts which, 
were they intercepted and tracked, could lead all the way back to the 
person who stole them in the first place?

In case this seems too far-fetched, or "too smart for the government", 
consider how they nabbed the Unabomer.

Eric

-- 
 Bank runs will start in mid 1999.