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Conspiring Against Your Employer? Watch What You Email
Eric Giguere writes "In a story that has Bay Street (the Canadian equivalent of Wall Street) in a kerfuffle, the Globe and Mail writes that bank employees defecting to set up a rival investment firm didn't realize that their employer could easily track the emails and messages they sent and received, even when they're sent via a nominally-secure system like RIM's BlackBerry. In particular, the employees were assuming that the messages they sent via direct PIN-to-PIN communication (a PIN uniquely identifies a BlackBerry device) weren't trackable. But if they're on the device, they're available to the employer to see. The employees may also have thought that PIN-to-PIN messages are encrypted, though RIM has always said that they're not -- it's only the connection to the corporate email server that is secure. A lot of damning information pulled from those emails and messages has made its way into a lawsuit."
Investment firms must catologue all emails for compliance and SEC inspection, in fact they must be kept for years. All transmitions including company issued handheld devices are monitored by this automated system at most firms. So if their canadian counterparts have to do similar things this is to be expected and they have a record of all of your emails for years probably.
And people should realize that due to new regulatory reasons like Sorbanes-Oxley companies are required by law to perform this.
In order that they don't get sued they need to treat e-mail as corporate records. So getting caught doing something like this is even more likely as companies make sure they can comply with that law.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Most large institutions have a BES, yes, but not all of them have the Mobile Data Service (MDS) enabled, which is what you'd need to run something like that. Without MDS, the BES is really only about getting email and PIM stuff in and out of the corporate mail server.
Eric