Stuck with inefficient private industry

Remember the story from last October about how a routine drug bust had netted some classified material from Los Alamos National Laboratory?

Well, it seems that the cure was worse than the affliction. Los Alamos, having gone from institutional management via the University of California to a partnership with Bechtel, one of the most notorious recipients of corporate welfare in Washington, decided to fix the problem by having all the computers super-glued. Actually, the USB ports, more specifically had to be super-glued.

That’s right, Los Alamos Nuclear Labs, one of the top US research labs with some of the smartest scientists and engineers has decided that Super Glue is the best answer to their endpoint security problems.

What about PCMCIA slots, PS/2, Serial Ports, Firewire ports and CD-ROM drives? What will happen when a researcher needs to use a biometric device, or other USB device? The computer system is now ruined and will have to have the USB ports replaced, or the system replaced. Your tax dollars at work.

To say nothing of what happens when the letter 't' wears out on your keyboard? Now, instead of replacing a $20 keyboard, you have to trash the whole computer, probably worth thousands of dollars.

Well, what else did you expect when you gave control of the labs to private enterprise, especially a company like Bechtel which makes their living off of fat government contracts and has learned how to pocket tons of cash while actually doing very little?

Correction: Indy Voter pointed out some misleading statements, at least one of which 'government management' implied direct Federal management, which the lab has never had (though the University of California is an institution within a government entity.) Though this is technically not an error I will count it as one, so I presently have 7 errors in 510 posts, and in accordance with the previously announced policy at Deep Thought, I am publically acknowleging erroneous information in a blog post and still have a fielding percentage for post accuracy of 503/510 = .986