How big were the missing hardrives from Los Alamos?

[Swede]

If a couple of them were 150 or 180 gigabytes that would be an enormous amount of info. A goldmine for a terrorist.

[Cybergata]

1. Which year" 2000? 2003? 2004?

They seem to misplace their hard drives all the time. I'm not sure of the size of drives, but it seems to me like they are either very careless with those drives, OR there is plenty of sharing of information with other countries.

:hippie:

[sangh0]

2. It was a Zip drive, according to an article in today's NY TImes

IIRC, they go up to 250MB

[mike_c]

3. think about it....

Los Alamos is a national weapons research laboratory, among other things. Would "a terrorist" or even a group of terrorists have the resources to:

1) ...recover the data? I'd be utterly shocked if it's not strongly encrypted. That can be broken, of course, but not likely in some clandestine workshop.

2) ...make use of the data, or even understand it? The data are most likely just that: research data. They might be immensely useful to another research effort of similar scale, but again, such data are unlikely to benefit "terrorists."

3) ...build any devices described? Even if the disks contain engineering data, once again those data are unlikely to benefit anyone without the necessary nuk-u-lar engineering and weapons manufacturing infrastructure. And then there's the matter of "filling in the missing bits" in the likely event that any such engineering data is not a complete set of directions for asssembling a weapons factory, with specifications for weapons production, etc. In other words, unless the engineering data are a complete cookbook. And even if they are, they're unlikely to be of any direct use whatsoever to "a terrorist."

IF the data on those disks is accessible and of high value to an existing or prospective weapons research and development program of that scale, then they might have some monetary value to a terrorist or terror organization, but only if they could find a buyer willing to risk it. That's not beyond the realm of imagination. But otherwise, I suspect their only value for "terrorists" is as objects that might be thrown at someone....