The Transportation Security Administration lost a computer hard drive containing private information on 100,000 employees, but it still dodged a big bullet Monday.

Two years after the highly sensitive hard drive went missing, a U.S. District Court judge on Monday rejected a bid by four disgruntled TSA employees to have their lawsuit certified as a class action. Had they succeeded, the TSA employees would have been seeking $1,000 per class member, or at least $100 million.

The hard drive discovered missing from agency headquarters in May 2007 contained names, social security numbers, birth dates, payroll information, financial allotments, and bank account and routing information. Which is pretty bad; on the other hand, the TSA does do a really good job of making people take off their shoes before boarding an airplane.

The TSA employees said the agency violated the Privacy Act and other laws in losing the precious data. But in his six-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. concluded that the lawsuit's remaining demands -- parts were dismissed earlier -- amounted to a predominantly monetary damage claim for which class action status is unsuitable. Suits & Sentences doesn't really understand what that means, but could figure it out given enough billable hours.