Australian Senator Pursues Case Of The Missing Laptops

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/173714.html

By Staff, Computer Daily News
CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA,
16 Jan 2002, 9:45 PM CST
 
Australia' Opposition Labor Party has vowed to keep up its pursuit of
bureaucrats over missing laptop computers, said to have either been
stolen or lost.
 
Senator Kate Lundy, Labor's shadow minister for information
technology, on Wednesday told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation
(ABC) radio news service the Opposition knows of 542 laptops lost or
stolen from federal departments in the last year.

At around 4,000 Australian dollars ($2,054) each, this amounts to a
tidy 2 million Australian dollars ($1.03 million) or so.

It's not only the replacement value of the laptops that worries Lundy
but the value of the information on the computers when they disappear.

"How do you place a value on classified information from Defence, or
Prime Minister and Cabinet? We know there was some
Cabinet-in-confidence material missing at one point," she said.

A government spokesperson advised Kate not to fret: all confidential
information is encrypted and should not be able to be retrieved from a
stolen computer, he said reassuringly. So the nation's secrets may be
safe after all.

Exchange Rate: $1 = 1.95 Australian dollars



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