A repairman discovered a confidential government CD hidden inside a notebook computer bought on eBay, a computer store in northern England said on Thursday.
A customer brought the laptop to Leapfrog Computers in Bolton on Monday asking to have it repaired, sales manager Jonathan Parry said.
"A technician had a look at it, opened it up to have a look at the components inside, and when you actually open up the laptop and take off the keyboard, underneath the keyboard was a CD," Parry said.
He said that it wasn't immediately clear whether the compact disc, marked "Home Office" and "Private and Confidential," was genuine.
The Home Office later confirmed it was genuine.
Britain's Home Office is the government body responsible for maintaining law and order and fighting terrorism.
When staff realized it was encrypted, they called the police, Parry said.
He said six counterterrorism officers arrived the next day, taking the laptop, along with DNA samples and fingerprints from anyone who had handled it.
The Home Office said it was investigating the incident. Greater Manchester Police said they collected a laptop on Tuesday but gave no further information.
Parry said the CD was wedged inside the body of the laptop, apparently deliberately. He added that it might have been stolen before being put on eBay.
The British government has suffered a series of embarrassing losses of public data.
In December, the government's top transport official said a disk containing the personal information of 3 million driving test candidates was lost.
The same month, the Department of Health said some 168,000 patients' information had also gone missing.
In January, the Ministry of Defense acknowledged that a stolen laptop might contain sensitive details on some 600,000 prospective military recruits.
But those incidents were dwarfed by the admission last November that tax officials had lost computer disks containing information -- including banking records -- on nearly half the population.
Civil liberties campaigners said the data losses are making it easier to lobby against ID cards.
NO2ID spokesman Michael Parker said he was watching "in slack-jawed wonder as a government which is so keen on taking [our] information is losing it so regularly."
"Things like this, although obviously they're not good news at all, they do serve as sterling examples of the kinds of things that can go tragically wrong," he said.
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