Or any other form of note that will stick to the computer.  UK government workers may want to keep that in mind: An internal memo has been passed around, acknowledging that the Department for Work and Pensions (DPW) has been effectively providing a way to breach their own security procedures:

From politics.co.uk:

“I have been advised of instances where password protected data has been sent out with the password being sent separately as detailed in Security Notice 02/07.

“However, once the data and the separate password are received, staff are then forwarding the data and password on together. This defeats the purpose of the security measure entirely.”

And how.  Perhaps it’s just a matter of educating how protection measures work in the digital age.  Data security solutions like full disk encryption from AlertBoot are very secure.  They work by scrambling the original data so that no one can make sense of it.  The effect is very hard to reverse because there are too many ways that could have been used to scramble the data in the first place.

Imagine, if you will, that Moby Dick was written on glass by etching the words with a needle, aided by a powerful microscope.  Then, you take a hammer and pulverize the glass, so that all the letters (not words) are in a pile a jumble.  Cracking modern encryption methods would be like piecing the glass‑novel back so you can read it.  It could be done.  It’d also take forever.  Plus, in your quest to piece things together, you would encounter those instances where you’ve used up every single letter except one—say a “z”—but every single sentence makes sense.  That one “z,” though, is an implication that you probably haven’t gotten it right.

Of course, the point of data encryption is not only to protect the data; one also wants to be able piece it back together—assuming that it’s the person who should have access to the data.  This is easily done in digital encryption.  The data is pieced back by supplying the correct password (or in the case of AlertBoot, two passwords: the username and the password).

And this is why you don’t keep your passwords near your computer.  Not on a Post‑it.  Not taped to the bottom of the keyboard.  Not on your monitor.  Not…you get the idea.  If your organization is going to (or have to) secure its digital assets and are planning on using full disk encryption, make sure people understand the consequences of their actions.