Can you say Court Martial? The Royal Navy can, and has, about an officer who lost or let a valuable laptop be stolen. That laptop contained personal information on about 600,000 people, many of whom are not in the Royal Navy but have applied. ComputerWorld covers the story here.

I'm wary of accepting the “laptop was stolen” argument, since many are just flat lost. PCWorld reported in 2005 that over 4,500 laptops were left in cabs in the city of Chicago alone. If you lost a laptop containing thousands of private records, wouldn't you start yelling “Stop, Thief!” as loudly as possible?

Of course, I'd also suggest a Court Martial for the idiot vice president, or in this case vice admiral, who assigns laptops full of important data. Such laptops must have pre-boot disk encryption by default.

How about a quick reprimand for the Royal Navy CIO? 600,000 records on one laptop? How about some centralized data storage and control, matey?