"If this had been found by a terrorist sympathiser God knows what could have happened. It's very serious. It's incredibly sloppy," student Michael Brown told the Daily Mirror after chancing across sensitive Royal Navy papers in a Portsmouth pub.
Mr Brown, 22, said the two-page document detailing HMS Albans' forthcoming tour of duty to the Mediterranean, Red Sea and Gulf had been left in a part of the pub where five men had earlier been playing pool.
Sloppy, is probably a good word since a Royal Navy spokesman said the documents were "sensitive" rather than "classified" and would have been prepared for families of sailors.
Less clear, though, is the correct word for a second revelation on what has turned out to be a bad news day for the navy. Crew from another ship, HMS York, have lost a SA80 assault rifle that fires 775 rounds a minute. The paucity of weaponry was discovered when a "stock check" was carried out in port.
There's a noble tradition of losing vital weaponry in the armed forces, of course, stretching back at least as far as the 15th century, when King Richard III lost his horse at the battle of Bosworth. Skip forward 520 years and it was still going on in October 2005 when a soldier suffered the humbling experience of leaving her Sig Sauer 9mm automatic pistol in a supermarket loo.
The police have suffered as well. In 2004, security documents pinpointing 62 sites from where missile attacks could be launched on planes at Heathrow were found flapping in the wind on the airport's perimeter road.
Security officials are also well known for losing their documents and laptops. In March 2000, MI6 was forced to place a small ad in London's Evening Standard offering a reward for the return of a laptop lost when an employee, thought to be a trainee, went on a boozy night out in a tapas bar. The anonymous ad feigned that the computer had been lost by an academic and contained vital information for a PhD thesis.
Also in March 2000, a thief stole a MI5 officer's laptop at Paddington station. The computer, containing heavily encrypted information relating to Northern Ireland, was apparently taken while the spy stopped to help a passer by. A thoughtful BBC article gave advice to security agents about how to look after their (or rather, the government's) possessions better.
But it didn't help for long as in December 2000 an MI5 agent left a briefcase containing secret papers on a train. Spy bosses ordered a search of all trains in Dorset after the document went missing, but to no avail.
In fact, the Ministry of Defence revealed in May 2000 that 35 laptops had been lost or stolen from government offices in the preceding three years.
And this doesn't seem to be an exclusively British phenomenon. In 2002, the US justice department admitted that 400 laptops were missing, including 317 from the FBI.
