  The image that pops to mind is that of Homer Simpson walking out of the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant with a radioactive rod stuck to his shirt, but this isn't nearly as funny. Along with a now-recovered set of keys to secure areas of Los Alamos National Laboratory, two data disks have gone missing, and it's enough to shut the joint down: urlLink U.S. Nuclear Lab Temporarily Halts Secret Work . No, we aren't under the same nuclear cloud we were during the Cold War, but today's consequences seem more dire to me. Many of our current threats pose no immediate danger to us by having information -- al-Qaeda want nuclear materials, not tapes. But there are rogue nations such as North Korea and Iran who might find some way to employ any lessons learned from data snuck out of Los Alamos. And remember, this is the same facility from which Dr. Lee stole secrets, though later reduced to downloading secure materials onto a non-secure machine when they couldn't build a case against him.
To this day, we don't know if anyone really knows with whom Lee may have been in contact. This could well prove to bite us in the buttocks. I've known many scientists and engineers; as a matter of full disclosure, I am an engineer. Many of those science-types I wouldn't trust to make it across the street. They live in a very protected world, so often times they lose sight of the world around them and the dangers in it.
And I'd guess that, with the removal of our primary nuclear threat from the playing board, their guards may have been even more relaxed in the past decade or so. Here's hoping this is just a case of a mad scientist bringing home a copy of Warcraft he plopped onto a Zip disk that was just sitting around. urlLink Read more! 
