(Credit:
National Archives and Records Administration)
The U.S. National Archives on Wednesday said it is offering a $50,000 reward for information leading to the recovery of a missing hard drive that contains personal information of former Clinton administration staff and visitors.
The small portable hard drive was being kept as a backup, the National Archives explained in a question-and-answer document (PDF) on its Web site. It held copies of about 113 four-millimeter tape cartridges of "snapshots" of hard-drive contents of employees who left the Executive Office of the President.
Because the staff maintained White House entry information and electronic address books, the external drive contains personally identifying information including names and Social Security numbers of staff and visitors to the White House complex during the Clinton administration, the FAQ said.
National Archives staff began searching for the missing drive March 24 and notified senior officials at the agency on April 2. The National Archives' inspector general then opened a criminal investigation and the agency informed the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team of the Department of Homeland Security, the White House Counsel's Office, staff of the House and Senate Oversight Committees, and a representative for former President Bill Clinton.
The National Archives will notify the individuals affected and offer them a year of credit monitoring. It is unknown how many people are affected, according to the FAQ.
"We do not know whether the drive was stolen, lost, or otherwise misplaced," the FAQ said.
U.S. officials are investigating the disappearance of 67 computers from the Los Alamos nuclear weapons lab in New Mexico, according to a nonprofit group that exposes government misconduct.
Of the missing computers, 13 were lost or stolen in the past year, including 3 taken from a scientist's home last month. A BlackBerry belonging to another worker was lost in a "sensitive foreign country," according to an internal Los Alamos Lab e-mail posted online by the Project On Government Oversight.
The group also posted a letter from the Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration rebuking the Los Alamos lab for treating the situation as a property management issue and not as a cybersecurity risk.
The "magnitude of exposure and risk to the laboratory is at best unclear as little data on these losses has been collected or pursued given their treatment as property management issues," the DOE memo says.
The incidents are "garnering a great deal of attention with senior management as well as NNSA (National Nuclear Security Administration) representatives," the Los Alamos Lab e-mail says.
The Associated Press reported this week that a Los Alamos spokesman said the computers may have contained names and addresses but did not have any classified information on them.
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