Data theft and why are we not doing anything about it?

It seems that there has been a lot of incidents lately regarding data theft, particularly in the UK.  There was the unencrypted CDs that were lost in the post and, as seems the norm lately, the theft from a car of a laptop that did not use hard drive encryption.  As I am sure you are aware, I am referring to the losses of unencrypted data from the Ministry of Defence, the DVLA and the Benefits Agency totaling up several thousand records missing included plenty of rather personal data.  Whilst trying to avoid talking about the actual losses of data and how/why they occurred in the first place, what I do find to be unbelievable is that the encryption of data is still not being taken as seriously as it should, especially when stored on laptop computers.  Even simple things like putting a password on a compressed ZIP file or Word document would help, but it seems that even these trivial things are not being done.

With the introduction of Windows 2000 you could encrypt files on your computer so that only you could read them using a new technology called Encrypting File System (EFS).  EFS is great and, if it had been used in the previously mentioned examples, it would have rendered all the 'lost' data useless if it was on a laptop that had been stolen.  Yes, if I was the thief then I could boot the laptop up using a special boot disk in order to make a copy of the files, but without logging on as the user with their password I would not be able to read the contents of these files as EFS encrypts it.

With Windows Vista there is an even better option, Bitlocker.  If you own the appropriate version of Windows Vista then you can use Bitlocker to encrypt the entire volume.  Not the contents of the files, but the whole partition 100%. So, booting the computer up with my special boot disk would only present me with an unrecognised volume that was impossible to mount without the recovery keys and the correct software.

Even if you don't own Windows Vista you could use EFS assuming you have Windows 2000 or XP.  Failing that, there have been products around that do a similar thing to Bitlocker for years; so why are people still storing sensitive data on unencrypted volumes...?  When I setup Bitlocker on my laptop it took about 2-3 hours to encrypt a 100Gb volume.  The performance hit is minimal once finished, to be honest, I have not noticed any impact on my computer at all.  So come on people, let's start storing our data a bit more securely!