Came across the following video yesterday, and it serves as a mildly humorous worst-case scenario of the "How Secure Is Your Data?" entry from a bit back.

http://media1.break.com/dnet/media/content/stolenlaptop.wmv

As laughably over-the-top this professor's claims and grandiose threats are, most concerning to me was the obvious lack of confidence he holds in the integrity of data on his computer (a mobile computer no less, of the sort that close to a million per year are stolen in the US alone).

This computer was obviously stolen while unattended, and if even the rudiments of security best practices were followed -- use of some sort of encrypted file system, be it PGP disk, EFS in Windows, or similar technologies -- he should be able to write it off as a costly and inconvenient loss of some hardware. Instead, his hysterical threats make it out to be a matter of national security, to which every scary government agency will soon swoop down in the black helicopters. The perpetrator(s), we are told, must prove that the data hasn't been tampered with, and that it hasn't been copied (how, pray tell, does one prove that? It's the sort of negative proof that's rather difficult to contrive), and maybe then they won't be sent off to secret Eastern European prisons. Okay, I made that last bit up, but it's along the lines of the hyperbole.

From a professional perspective, I find the diatribe by this professor very self incriminating, hinting at terrible neglect in the management of data (purportedly other people's data as well, which should rightly make those third parties very angry). While it is almost certainly a ruse to scare a reluctant thief into confessing, it's akin to claiming that the guy who stole your car is in big trouble, because you just happen to store nuclear warheads in the trunk -- I'd have more of a problem with the guy with nukes in his trunk than with a petty thief.

Protect your data. Acting surprized when hardware loss occurs isn't acceptable, and is tantamount to gross neglect.

[Miles Archer has rightly pointed out in the comments that this video is a couple of years old. Nonetheless, we've had powerful encryption options for a long, long time. A decade ago I got the senior management, accounting and HR departments of a firm using PGPDisk for confidential data, separating the administration of systems (e.g. system ACLs) from the need and ability to access the data. It worked beautifully. Since then we've had numerous new, and more transparent, options for securing our data]