The AP reports Sensitive data missing from National Archives.

The drive is missing from the Archives facility in College Park, Md., a Washington suburb. The drive was lost between October 2008 and March 2009 and contained 1 terabyte of data — enough material to fill millions of books.

A Republican committee aide who was at the inspector general’s briefing said the Archives had been converting the Clinton administration information to a digital records system when the hard drive went missing.

The aide, who was not authorized to be quoted by name, said the hard drive was left on a shelf and unused for an uncertain period of time. When the employee tried to resume work, the hard drive was missing.

Did it go something like this? “Oh, I’ll just set this 1TB drive with the personal identity information of top officials and sensitive logs over here on this open shelf for a while and go work on other things…”. Not exactly the sort of risk calculation you would expect in the National Archives. Maybe they do not have a high rate of technology theft, but even so the person using the drive knew the value of the contents. I bet they still keep valuable papers under strict lock and environmental controls.