Data loss is a political hot potato in the UK at the moment. Government agencies have managed to lose personal data in all sorts of imaginative ways. The most recent by a contractor on a memory stick.

I suppose that working in an IT department you are aware of an on going replacement of lost and stolen laptops on a fairly regular basis, and I would think most losses contain information of use to a competitor or criminal.

See

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7575989.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7570611.stm

for details of UK government data mishaps