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Self-Shredding E-Mail
yoink! writes: "I just read an article on CNN.com describing a self-shredding e-mail system. With all the persistent e-mail documents gathered by the Government in the MS Anti-Trust case, and the massive shredding of paper documents by parties in the Enron fiasco, it's no wonder people have been looking for an electronic solution to a material problem solved years ago with some cutting tools, a motor, and a garbage bag." One of the companies highlighted here was called Disappearing, Inc. when it was mentioned a few years ago, but now several others have joined the fray.
How bout not sending anything that could get you in trouble? Common sense should prevail here. But in the wake on Enron, I am sure they will do well.
One thing I did not see in the article, what happens if the person on the other end saves the email as an attachment, or saves it? I doubt it would be able to "shred" that. This is a very niche market item imo. Once again, DON'T SEND IT IF IT COULD GET YOU IN TROUBLE.
Sent from your iPad.
People still will be able to print out messages, or make screenshots of their MUA - ESPECIALLY when they know that the mail is going to self-destruct. So these expensive systems still won't guarantee against a copy surviving (especially if it's something hot that could be used to blackmail somebody, such as the order to shred all records...).
;-)
In short: Why waste money on a system that prevents Email from getting read by Law-enforcement-officers? Why not simply do nothing illegal?
I fear however that they might be in for a surprise when the apparently "self shredded" messages pop up at all those likely and unlikely places like backup tapes, swap files, printouts and the like.
It's probably safer to employ a clean and transparent corporate culture, then getting kicked in the but by embarassing messages popping up on ol' backup tapes.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
have nothing to hide. I don't think shareholders would see an email shredder as good news. Sure, you've reduced "liability," but you could further reduce it by having a higher set of moral codes. If I was a shareholder, I'd probably dump the company if news that the company needed to protect itself from itself.
Its too bad that company execs won't see things that way. I guess the most valuable thing then to have as an investor is the list of Dissapearing, Inc's clients.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
Does anyone have information on how this idea works?
Okay, you have a remote encryption key (Me to keyserver: "Please make this key publicly available until 5/5/2002") which you can use to decrypt documents for a while.
But what is to stop people taking a copy of this key, or of the decrypted message? Do you have to run a "trusted software" reader to view the message?
Either way, it sounds like the equivalent of sending a Yahoo card - "Click here to view your message, which we will store for 3 months"
But then, screenshots are still admissable in court.
And we all know how overwhelmingly successful those have been at preventing copying...
The old bromide that "information wants to be free" is not just a statement about copyright. It's a statement about privacy as well - whether you want it to spread or not, once you set information in a digital form and send it to someone else, controlling it becomes well-nigh impossible.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
If I trust the recipient, all I need do is write "Please to not save a plain-text version of this document." Which, essentially, is all that this option can do - ask. Not prevent.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Maybe for personal email. But a corporate email system is the property of the company. Anything you create on corporate time becomes the property of the company. An email you send to your co-worker does not become the "property" of the co-worker. It's still part of the corporate network and is still the property (and responsibility) of the company. Thus they have every right to "shred" the message.
They have every right to tell you not to print it out and save it; but of course that's what people will do if they know the messages will be deleted after a certain time. I print out and save messages to cover my own ass.
Which brings up a point. I print out the stuff with full headers, with message ID and info when it was sent; however, does it really serve a purpose? I remembered thinking that while watching "Clear and Present Danger", when Harrison Ford prints out a memo and shoves it into the other director's face saying something like "here's the proof". What good is my printout if I don't have server logs to back up that the message was actually sent to me? What good is a backup of the server logs if I can't prove it wasn't tampered by myself? I know my boss will believe me if I used it as proof to protect my ass, but would a jury? Am I just wasting trees?
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
My very first manager at my first real corporate job drilled into my head that you assume every email you write will be published in the paper... if you aren't comfortable with that then it shouldn't be said in email. It's a rule that's served me well...
--Rob
And if you use this system for which law enforcement access is required whereby the emails are no longer available will you now be charged with interference of an investigation? Dustruction of evidence? Failure to co-operate in an investigation?
I doubt there is currently much a legal-leg to stand here to prevent your self from being raked over one way or another.
Please keep in mind, I'm not a lawyer, however, these seem like the obvious paths law enforcemet would go to ensure these systems don't prohibit their ability to investigate.
Companies and individuals destroy documents for a number of legal reasons. Such as keep the competition from seeing trade secrets, draft copies that are not ready for public release and to minimize discovery costs.
Many companies have document retention policies right now. Most paperwork can be destroyed at any time. Some paperwork may be required by federal, state or local law to be kept. For instance, companies that are regulated by the feds have certain paperwork that they need to keep around such as banks, airlines and radio stations. Some of these document retention systems will give you the ability to differentiate between the document you are creating and how long it is to stick around.
This is absolutely true. However, these systems are not at all designed to foil the presumed intent of the recipient to copy the content (as DRM systems for copyrighted entertainment content are). They're designed to give a level of automatic prevention against inadvertent copying.
Consider, as an example: I run a business in which sensitive information is bandied about by internal corporate e-mail. In order to keep a whole variety of bad things from happening to that information (subpoenas years later, inadvertent forwarding to somebody who shouldn't see it, proprietary information being leaked by cast-off hardware), I enact an electronic document destruction policy; one year after an internal e-mail is sent, it is destroyed. I mandate use of one of these self-shredding systems to help enforce my policy.
Now I haven't really helped anything from a strict can-it-be-done standpoint: a whistle-blowing employee can still take the aforementioned camcorder and set it up; a sysadmin who's for some reason obsessed with archiving all his mail can probably download a crack for the system in question. These issues are pushed into the realm of policy, but the number of such issues that have to be dealt with strictly by policy means decreases by an order of magnitude. What I have really accomplished is to drastically reduce the probability that something will happen that nobody in the organization intended.