It's just another in a long line of stolen laptops . . . unless you work in management at AT&T and you're worried about your Social Security number falling into the hands of identity thieves. Or, you're worried that your co-workers might find out how much -- or how little -- you actually earn.

While AT&T has declined to disclose the number of employees put at risk by the May 15 theft from an employee's car, one manager who is among them tells me he knows of others located throughout every corner of AT&T's vast empire in the United States (comments posted to Buzzblog have contended that nonmanagement workers are involved, too). "I have found one [management] individual who was not impacted," says the manager, who asked not to be named. "This is probably big, but not everyone."

"I'm very disappointed in my company," he adds. "Eight days passed before we were notified . . . and it took up to another 10 days to be informed about requesting a fraud alert and to be given instructions for signing up for credit watch."

What does AT&T have to say? In a bit we'll get to a long excerpt from a Q&A that the company provided to managers, who learned of the breach via e-mail. That e-mail read in part:

"This is to alert you to the recent theft of an AT&T employee's laptop computer that contained AT&T management compensation information, including employee names, Social Security numbers, and, in most cases, salary and bonus information. . . . We deeply regret this incident. You will soon hear about additional steps we're taking to reinforce our policies to safeguard sensitive personal information and ensure strict compliance in order to avoid incidents like this in the future."

Regrets were not enough to allay the anger of the manager I've been quoting.

"It is pathetic that the largest telecom company in the world -- with more than 100 million customers -- doesn't encrypt basic personal information," he says.

Coincidentally, AT&T announced a new managed encryption service merely days before news of the laptop theft became public.

Failure to encrypt and otherwise better protect such data is inexcusable at this point in time, says Kelly Todd, staff member at attrition.org, a security site that maintains a database of data-breach incidents.