Can these numbers actually be correct? Your editorial states 10,000 lost each week at the 36 largest airports. That means on average 278 laptops per week, or roughly 40 laptops per day lost at the 36 major airports. As someone who travels a great deal through our country's major airports, I find those numbers questionable. Just sounds a bit too high - but, who knows, maybe so.

In 2005 I purchased a bunch of 1 gig secure fingerprint thumbdrives, and we instituted rules where all company data carried off-site must be on a secure thumbdrive. We require both air travellers and day travellers to adhere to this rule.

These little drives have a fingerprint reader built-in, and you can set and reset whose fingerprint unlocks the drive. So far, the plan has worked well - no drives lost, no laptops lost. We feel more secure and since our business is based on Intellectual property and client data I am hopeful that should something get lost or stolen, it would be unusable.

My only fear remains that someone will get lazy, move data onto a laptop's hard drive, and forget to save it back to the thumbdrive and purge it. So ultimately, its down to people not technology - as with any such endevour.