If you're going to steal, by all means, be ethical!

So obviously in Sweden, ethical standards are pretty high.

Here is the IT scenario:

A professor at Sweden's Umeå University has his laptop stolen. I'm guessing this laptop has a good bit of important stuff on it, especially since this professor teaches at Umeå University, the seventh best college to go to school, according to this website.

Anyway, the laptop is stolen and a week later, the Swedish professor receives a USB stick in the mail with ALL of the data from his laptop. So, a perpetrator steals his laptop, but mails him all of this data. Unbelievable.

A local paper quoted the Swedish professor saying "this story makes me feel hope for humanity." Well, why steal the laptop in the first place?

According to the article, "This [scenario] is the best possible argument against those fingerprint-scanning laptops we're bound to ever hear."

So, without the help of some nifty IT software, this victimized Swedish professor would have lost a good bit of data. We as a society are leaning more and more on technology to store some of our most precious possessions, which in these days is now coming in the form of information.

I would love to know your thoughts on this one. Is this an ethical argument? Does this prove that IS and IT are not only vital in a firm at all organizational levels, but also to us on a personal level?