Slashdot Mirror
Handling Corporate Laptop Theft Gracefully
Billosaur writes "From NPR, we get a Marketplace story about the theft of corporate laptops and the sensitive data they may contain, specifically how to handle the repercussions. From the story: 'TriWest operates in about 21 states. It's based in Phoenix, Arizona. In December of 2002, somebody broke into the company's offices and stole two computer hard drives.And those hard drives contained the personal information of 550,000 of our customers from privates in the military all the way up to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.' How they handled the situation earned them an award from the Public Relations Society of America."
Then there's no data loss, and thus no ethical or legal obligation to tell anyone, and thus no need to handle getting caught with your pants down gracefully.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
FYI, this story was a followup to a longer story about laptop and identity theft. The original story did indeed focus a lot on data encryption.
From the original article:
"This is Jonathan Zittrain, a co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. He says he's not surprised that all of this information is walking around on portable computers. People want to be productive on the run, he says. But he says there are pretty sure-fire ways to protect sensitive information. Like, encrypting it, or leaving the data on the main server and remotely tunneling through the Internet to work with it."
Way to declare this the "worst article ever" in the same post you brazenly declare you didn't read it, by the way. A bold move, even by Slashdot standards.