To quote the darkreading post:

You two have hit upon the very essence of the portable storage security problem-- the devices are meant to improve employee productivity, allowing employees to take work home with them. The guy who spilled all the data at Veterans Affairs was trying to be a good guy--he took his work home to do some extra, and then got his laptop stolen. The security people say shoot him, he exposed secure data. But if his laptop hadn't been stolen, he probably would have been praised for his extra effort. The technology is there to help the employees, and it seems that firing them, or denying them access to the technology, is contrary to its purpose. Yet, we can't just let these folks walk around with sensitive data, or allow them to introduce malware through curiousity about a found thumb drive. So what's the answer??
I'd have to disagree with the first bold line. It has nothing to do with him trying to be a "good" guy IMHO simply because usb thumb drives make data transportation so easy (upwards of 8gb drives or probably higher by now). When he signed his employment papers, there's undoubtedly a few lines or more about sensitive data, etc. It all starts with "well, it's only a few" followed by a few more times doing it, he sees everyone else doing it....maybe his boss even did it. Nobody's the wiser until something bad like this happens and he's the scapegoat that'll be crucified, drawn and quartered, tarred and feathered, etc... It doesn't matter if the president was doing the same thing, it'll always be the lowest man on the totem pole who gets axed.

Prime example: everyone here knew about the Marriott incident where millions of customer information records with SSN, addresses, credit card numbers, etc on a tape got stolen, right?
I personally knew the guy who's job it was to manage the backups (I worked at Marriott Vacation Club International for 3 years). His office had tapes everywhere, stacked up, drawers full...simply because tape management is almost impossible to do after a few weeks of inheriting. They have Iron Mountain, just like a lot of major businesses do. His office is locked every day, just like everyone else's. He comes in on a Monday and finds a few tapes missing. What does he do? The honest thing. He reports it immediately and that's when the sh*t hit the fan. He got ostracized from the higher-ups because of his "sloppiness", etc. Got suspended without pay until they were to decide his fate (which took a month before he got fired). How can one really blame him for something he didn't start, that everyone prior to him did, etc. I've got several administrator friends over there and they say "Yeah, before this happened, MI would call us and say 'Hey, did you guys get those tapes we mailed'...'No, haven't gotten them at all'...'Ok, we'll just send another batch'". They issued a mandate to have anyone with tapes in their possession to send them in so they can be identified and put away safely. They're STILL having tapes sent in by people that have ZERO rights to have them. VPs, receptionists, etc...saying things like "YEAH I FOUND THIS IN MY BOTTOM UNLOCKED DRAWER".

I know I went on a diatribe there, but it pisses me the F off to see a case like that where there's so many guilty parties, yet one guy gets the axe because everyone got lax. The second bold part is not true either. I guarantee a lot more people than him were working from home using laptops from work with sensitive data on it and you can bet the bank THAT stopped after he got nailed.

It always starts out small, like petty theft. Nothing bad happens, so it progresses more and more until eventually, something goes haywire and it's all over CNN.

In the end, it's a lose-lose situation, really. The guy was trying to do work from home or wherever. No faulting him for that. What he really did wrong was have sensitive data on his laptop which wasn't in his actual office. Data integrity is immediately compromised the minute you have any alternate transfer/storage method available and trusting anyone to always do the right thing is open to interpretation.