Fresh in from the “add injury to insult” department is a story about the Brit’s security czar, who wants to make it a crime to lose an unencrypted laptop. Nodding to the fact that often its the data on these laptops rather than the hardware itself that’s at risk, he’s proposing pressing charges for the loss of sensitive personal data on laptops.

A single incident wouldn’t trigger charges, but “gross negligence” would be punishable by jail time and fines.

We actually like this heavy handed approach. Non-techcnical people tend to be irresponsible with their hardware, not really realizing it’s often our data within that hardware that’s also at risk. We hope this wakes them up a little bit, and that we’ll get a similar law here.

Lose an unencrypted laptop and ‘face criminal action’ [Computerworld UK]