FBI Still Losing Weapons, Laptops and Data

According to the arstechnica.com story:

In the 44 months that it took to complete the new audit, the FBI lost 160 weapons and 160 laptop computers—a massive improvement over the 354 weapons and 317 laptops lost during the first 28-month-long audit.

"Perhaps most troubling," says the report, "the FBI could not determine in many cases whether the lost or stolen laptop computers contained sensitive or classified information. Such information may include case information, personal identifying information, or classified information on FBI operations." Laptops can also contain goodies like the software that the FBI uses to make its identification badges, a copy of which was installed on a laptop stolen from the Boston Field Office in July 2002.

It is stories like this that make privacy advocates mistrust the government and speak out against national id cards and massive databases containing info on law abiding private citizens. This data inevitably will wall into the wrong hands. If we ever create a comprehensive database about private citizens for the purposes of increasing national security and/or tracking medical records, it will only be a matter of time before large portions of that data are accidentally left unsecured on the internet, are recovered from lost or stolen hardware and/or are compromised by hacker attacks.

If you'd like more evidence, try the following searches on the Google News web site and see just how common this sort of problem is:

lost laptops
stolen laptops
identity theft laptops
military data identity theft