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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."
I'm sorry, but I feel no pity for people being caught this way. Its very clear when you start working somewhere that the computers you use are the property of the employer, and you should expect no privacy from these machines. They used company owned BlackBerries because they thought it would be secret (implying that they knew other company computers were not). If you use something company owned because you think it is secure, while other company propery is not secure, it just shows you dumb enough to be caught. If they were so concerned about their privacy, they should not have used any company property.