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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
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.
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.