Telecommuting Backlash

coondoggie writes to tell us that advocates of the telecommute have stood up against recent finger pointing based on recent telecommuter screw ups. One of the more notable screw up was the recent loss of many veteran's personal information by a VA employee. From the article: "Despite years of growing acceptance, telework still has such detractors. 'The No. 1 challenge is cultural inertia. It's motivating the middle managers, teaching them a new way of doing work,' O'Keeffe says. 'It's the Luddite mentality that we need to change.'"

Comments

The problem isn't telecommuting

[Loconut1389]

The problem here isn't telecommuting, it is bad security practices and these problems probably would have happened one way or another, whether it's over a SSH tunnel, VPN, or local on the lan.

Re:The problem isn't telecommuting

[networkBoy]

Take your secure environment with you!
My employer mandates that the encryption feature of our notebooks be used. But it's a PITA, especially if your drive gets corrupted. To counter that we have an on-line backup system that takes a daily image (file by file, not binary image of the disk, for obvious space savings possibilities) of your drive and stores it whenever you are in the plant. While you are off-plant you are still secure because of the encryption. If we lost a notebook we could lose billions of dollars (assuming it's the right notebook). Shit, the data on mine is worth ~$75-100M.

The headlines should read: MegaCorp loses notebook with customer data on it. Company issues this statement: "This is a non-issue, the notebook was encrypted with a system that meets XYZ standard, it will take no less than 200 years for the system to be cracked."
And the statement should be true.
-nB

Re:The problem isn't telecommuting

[colmore]

The headlines should read: MegaCorp loses notebook with customer data on it. Company issues this statement: "This is a non-issue, the notebook was encrypted with a system that meets XYZ standard, it will take no less than 200 years for the system to be cracked."

Oops, the laptop that was stolen had the PGP password written on a post-it-note. Or it was the guys' daughters' college fund account number. Or they were logged in while working at a coffee shop, got up to use the bathroom, and came back to an empty table. Or a corporate spy stole it once, put on a keylogger, and then steals it again. Ask the police how private your fingerprints are. Does your boss put retina scanners on all company laptops? Can you be sure that nobody with data access would be dumb enough to keep any of that info on their USB drive or a CDR? Are you using strong crypt on your swap space? What do your bosses do to make 100% sure that nobody is printing out information on their home deskjet and leaving the printouts in the recycle bin on thursday morning? Are you so sure that there aren't moles in your office that you'll let a billion dollars juts walk out the front door? If your data is really as valuable as you say it is, then you need to have the working assumption that someone out there is going to pull some James Bond style shit to get at it, they're not going to stop at "aw shucks, they *encrypted* it!" A password is relatively easy to bribe someone out of. If they never have to show up on site to access the data, then that's all they'll ever need.

When your data is valuable enough that people would REALLY want to steal it, people, not protocols and passwords, are the big problem. When you let people just walk out of your office with company secrets, you're not just increasing the size of the problem, you're adding entire DIMENSIONS to it. People get lazy about things that they have to do every day. Lab Chemists and Biologists have horrible cancer incidence rates because they eventually get lax with safety procedures, even though they know better than anyone on the planet how dangerous what they're doing is. The human brain is set up in such a way that something it encounters every day without visible harm stops registering as "threat" pretty fast. No matter how rigorously you try to follow standard XYZ at the office, people will get lazy when they're looking over some work in front of the TV.

the article says it all!

[dan dan the dna man]

"The analyst whose laptop was stolen from his house was not a teleworker, just someone who took work home with him."

On what grounds are you going to detract from telecommuting in that statement? Every worker I know a)has a latop and b)moves it around. I don't think any of us would call ourselves telecommuters in any sense of the word. The fact we take work home, on 'theivable' media isn't an argument against telecommuting, it's an argument for us not taking work home!

I know there are telecommuters on /., but everyone I know, even in the IT industry has to go and show some flesh at a physical location to get paid. I'd love to telecommute but to be honest, it's mostly impractical for most people who have to engage with humans to get their job done effectively.

The next question for me is, who is this backlash against?