Want UK Top Secret Data? Try Ebay!

POLICE are investigating the discovery of a confidential Home Office disc by computer technicians - which was reportedly in a laptop bought on eBay. Source

It occurs to me that you can

It occurs to me that you can pull a grand prank with this kind of thing - randomly generate some names (foreign-sounding for preference), assign a crime to each one, put a few alarmist tabloid-friendly phrases - 'lost track of', 'police searching', 'suspected of further offences', 'now goes under the name of Abu Jihad' - and leave it around with 'Home Office - Top Secret - Not To Be Released To Press' written on it.

I'm not saying that's what's happened here, but it's going to somewhere, sometime.

Sounds well dodgy. I don't

Sounds well dodgy. I don't often take laptops apart, but last time I did I had the impression there wasn't enough spare space for a cigarette paper, let alone a 120mm dia, 1mm thick disc. And why would anyone buy a broken laptop on eBay, without complaining? More likely a message from the Home Office to say "we've found out how to encript personal data...".