Condi Rice’s State Department seems… well, feckless is one word that leaps to mind. Via Schneier on Security (who wonders whether the laptops were encrypted), this report in Congressional Quarterly by Jeff Stein:

Hundreds of employee laptops are unaccounted for at the U.S. Department of State, which conducts delicate, often secret, diplomatic relations with foreign countries, an internal audit has found.

As many as 400 of the unaccounted for laptops belong to the department’s Anti-Terrorism Assistance Program, according to officials familiar with the findings.

The program provides counterterrorism training and equipment, including laptops, to foreign police, intelligence and security forces.

Ironically, the Anti-Terrorism Assistance Program is administered by the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security (DS), which is responsible for the security of the department’s computer networks and sensitive equipment, including laptops, among other duties. It also protects foreign diplomats during visits here.

DS officials have been urgently dispatching vans around the bureau’s Washington-area offices to collect and register employee laptops, said department sources who could not speak on the record for fear of being fired.

The inventory sometimes strips DS investigators of their laptops for “days, or weeks,” they said.

The State Department’s Inspector General launched an audit of the equipment about three months ago. Only the first stage, or inventory of equipment, has been completed.

A State Department official referred all questions regarding laptop losses to the Inspector General.

A senior IG official, asking not to be identified, said he could “not comment on ongoing work.”

Nita M. Lowey , D-N.Y., who heads a House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees State Department operations, said she was concerned about the security revelations.

“The importance of safeguarding official laptops and office equipment containing sensitive information is not a new concern,” she said through a spokesman. “I intend to review the facts about this situation.”

“Unaccounted for” does not necessarily mean the laptops have been lost. But they are “missing” until they have been found or otherwise accounted for.

Auditors found that the department had lost track of $30 million worth of equipment, according to one official, “the vast majority of which . . . perhaps as much as 99 per cent,” was laptops.

Calculating that the average State Department laptop costs $3,000, another official said, hundreds, perhaps as many as a thousand, were missing. It could not be learned how many employees have been issued laptops.

On Feb. 6, the department’s Senior Assessment Team gathered at the State Department headquarters in Foggy Bottom to discuss the security of “personal identification information.”

The department’s official in charge of computer equipment, John Streufert, warned the more than two dozen officials present that the department did not have good records of its inventory.

A “significant deficiency” relating to laptops existed, Streufert said, according to a source who attended the meeting.

Continue reading—there’s lots more.