January 1953
Physicist John A. Wheeler's contributions to science are legendary. He debated with Einstein, coined the terms black hole and wormhole, and worked with Niels Bohr on developing the theory of nuclear fission at Princeton. But even certifiable geniuses can let state secrets slip through their fingers. According to historian Gregg Herken, Wheeler boarded a train in Trenton on January 6, 1953, with a six-page report that included, among other things, details on how to make a hydrogen bomb. Wheeler realized the papers were missing the next day—he supposed he'd misplaced them after a trip to the bathroom. Federal agents talked to other passengers on the train, scoured the car Wheeler was in, and even examined the very tracks the train had rolled over. But the documents were never found. And the world, so far, still hasn't blown up.
Lisa Larsen, Time Life Pictures / Getty Images
March 2000
A senior MI6 agent got wasted in a tapas bar and mistakenly left his laptop behind on March 3, 2000. It was recovered two weeks later following the publishing of an advertisement in the London Evening Standard, which listed the computer as the property of an academic desperate to reclaim Ph.D. research on a Toshiba 4000 Series laptop. That month proved especially brutal on British intelligence, as MI5 revealed that one of its agents had a laptop stolen on March 4 in the Paddington train station.
July 2009
An earlier incident involving an Apple iPhone 4G gone astray led to tragedy: 25-year-old Sun Danyong committed suicide last summer after a fourth generation iPhone under his charge went missing. Danyong jumped out of his apartment window to his death days after reporting that he couldn't find one of the 16 phones that were under his purview. He was an engineer at Foxconn, an electronics manufacturing company based in China, where he was responsible for shipping iPhone prototypes from the Foxconn plant to Apple. Apple released the following statement: "We are saddened by the tragic loss of this young employee, and we are awaiting results of the investigations into his death. We require our suppliers to treat all workers with dignity and respect."
AP Photo
October 2008
The British website Government Gateway, which provides access and details on everything from tax records to parking tickets, was shut down in early November 2008 after a USB memory stick containing passwords of 12 million people was found in a bar's parking garage. The Department for Work and Pensions insisted at the time that security had not been breached. The government became aware of the loss when the flash drive was handed over to the Daily Mail two weeks after it was found outside a pub in Staffordshire.
October 2007
When Ashton Kutcher lost his cellphone in 2007, he wasn't worried about losing other A-listers' digits—the phone reportedly held more than 30 photos of wife Demi Moore in the nude. Kutcher lost the phone while in Spain and the man who found the phone was trying to sell the phone photos for $1 million. A person with alleged knowledge of the theft said, “finally Ashton decided to ring it and spoke to they guy…. He demanded that the guy give it back but the man switched the phone off.” Presumably, it's now his private stash.
Jim Ruymen, UPI / Landov
December 2008
In late 2008, Visa Chief Executive Joseph Saunders traveled from the company's San Francisco headquarters to New York City to speak at a Goldman Sachs financial-services conference. His speech started off at 7:15 a.m. with an original opening: "'I'm supposed to start off, and say that I'm very happy to be here, and I guess I am. But it's 4:15 in the morning as far as I'm concerned, and I lost my wallet on the way here." Nothing like a bit of personal experience to plug your company's security and protection provisions, right?
AP Photo
April 2009
An agent working for the Serious Organised Crime Agency, a national U.K. agency charged with investigating organized crime, left her purse bearing a USB drive stocked with a list of undercover agent names and the fruits of more than five years of investigations on a bus in Bogota, Colombia, at the El Dorado Airport. As a result, SOCA curtailed operations in the area and was forced to relocate informants and agents for fear that the information might end up in the possession of drug barons.
Kaveh Kazemi / Getty Images
August 2009
Korean violinist Hahn-Bin hopped out of a cab in Chinatown after a rehearsal at Lincoln Center in Manhattan without his most prized possession: an 18th-century violin valued at more than $700,000. The 22-year-old prodigy was preparing for a performance at Carnegie Hall. The instrument, as well as his credit card, was retrieved after GPS records revealed the identity of the cabbie who ported him home. It's not the first, or most valuable, instrument that has been left in a city cab: Lynn Harrell forgot his $4 million Stradivarius cello and Yo-Yo Ma left his $2.5 million Stradivarius cello in 1999. Both instruments were later returned.
Andrew Chiciak
Summer 2000
John O'Neill, head of counterterrorism operations in New York City, once left a Palm Pilot full of police contacts at Yankee Stadium; another time he lost a cellphone. In the summer of 2000, he lost the motherlode, a briefcase chock full of classified documents in a hotel conference room while attending an FBI meeting in Tampa. The briefcase was quickly recovered by local officials after it was stolen from the conference room. Among the documents that went missing for a few hours: a brief outlining the entire annual counterterrorism plan for New York City. O'Neill died the next year during the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center.
December 2001
On New Year’s Eve 2001, The Wall Street Journal reported a big scoop courtesy of an IBM desktop computer that had been left behind when al Qaeda leaders fled Kabul following a U.S. bombing raid. An opportunistic looter grabbed the computer, which had been used by al Qaeda operatives for four years, as well as a Compaq laptop, and sold them to a local computer dealer. A Wall Street Journal reporter bought the computers for $1,100, gaining access to hundreds of files that were authenticated by U.S. officials as the work of al Qaeda, including plans for biological warfare, complaints of unpaid salaries, and a bomb-making guide.
January 2008
Legendary photographer Annie Leibovitz lost a resource as valuable as any of her photographs when an assistant left her iPhone in the back of a cab. A passenger later found the iPhone and its A-list contacts, including Jerry Seinfeld, Anna Wintour, Philip Glass, and Lance Armstrong. Before the good Samaritan graciously returned the phone, he downloaded the phone numbers of Leibovitz's famous friends. In a bit of just desserts, the semi-hero accidentally merged his contacts with Leibovitz's, including someone named "Joey," who is "into hung bb [bareback] tops."
Katy Winn / AP Photo
