DISQUS

Technology Liberation Front: How Does Government Lose So Many Laptops?

  • Luis Villa · 3 years ago
    Presumably because everyone loses laptops, and the government are the only people who talk about it in public. I've never seen any research on the issue, but I know that we lost them regularly at some of my old places of employment (I certainly lost one myself with fairly confidential company information on it), and I once attended an internet law conference at Harvard where Charlie Nesson practically caused a heart attack by asking corporate counsel who were present what would happen if their CEO's laptop were lost. I got the sense it was not merely hypothetical for some people.
  • lippard · 3 years ago
    Laptops are a common target of thieves, and it's also common for employees departing on bad terms to not return them (unless there are severance payments contingent on return of equipment and information).

    Encryption and remote delete capability are growing in importance.
  • Amanda · 3 years ago
    When I was a federal employee, we "lost" several laptops that (to the best of my knowledge) never left their designated service.

    What happened is that every now and then, someone would decide that we needed a better system for tracking equipment. So they'd roll out a database that didn't work very well and give contradictory instructions about who was supposed to fill it out. The people who were supposed to use it didn't always have access, and compliance wasn't that great anyway because it was a pain in the ass.

    So fairly frequently, a piece of equipment would get entered into the database when it entered our office, and not checked out of the database when it left (even though it was going where it was supposed to, not to somebody's eBay shop or anything), whether because someone helpfully checked it in without bothering to ascertain who it belonged to, or the person who checked it in left and the new person didn't have access to the database, or whatever.

    Eventually there would be an audit and a dozen things that the database said were in our office, wouldn't be there. Presto, "lost" equipment.

    While obviously some government employees are losing or stealing laptops, when I read stories about how audits turned up tens or hundreds of missing laptops, I tend to assume that, like my experience, it's an artifact of a crappy tracking system.