"The number of consumers that shoot RAW is so low that it doesn't matter to them."
That's changing, with the increased popularity of cameras like the Canon EOS models, and also with the terriffic new ease of obtaining inexpensive, very high quality poster sized prints.
There are a lot of people who were pretty serious about photography, took a hiatus, and are getting back into it now that it's easy. This is the first time in their lives that the sort of quality that was once the exclusive domain of medium- and large-format cameras, is accessible.
And these people have no difficulty at all with the understanding that the RAW file is the digital equivalent of the film negative.
"It's black Tuesday all over again. Everybody sell, sell, sell! The market is about to collapse!"
It's possible that people made money overnight by accidentally holding positions that they intended to close. It's also possible that the error could compound the next day by creating problems at opening. It could conceivably cost a LOT of money to hold a position that you wanted out of when the market closed.
"The SEC also gets rather in a huff if traders are not closely monitored for violations of sections 16 and 20 of the Securities Exchange Act"
I've only been in a situation one time where this applied to me, with any degree of risk. Early in 1986 while working for Haynes & Boone, I knew about the takeover bid for Safeway. This wasn't revealed to the general stockholders/employees until the next quarter -- when they started receiving litigation documents and tender offers and stuff like that, that we were already preparing.
At the time, I didn't have any money or even much of an idea what could be done with this kind of information, but it was certainly made very clear to me that it would be a Very Bad Thing to discuss the minimal information I had with anyone outside the firm, or to do any trading based on the information. I'm sure at the time, just the idea that I could lose that shiddy job was enough to keep me honest. The only thing I was really aware of, was that I was part of the process of making a whole lot of people lose their jobs, and asking them to sell their stock at rock bottom price (or risk holding it to zero, I suppose). I remember it didn't bother me at the time, because I perceived these people as being in a higher class than I was in, what with their good jobs and having enough money to buy things like stock in a company. Hell, they probably owned late model cars, lived in houses, that sort of high-falutin' lifestyle. Here I was with a college degree working for a bunch of Texas assholes, not even making enough money to meet my modest expenses. In other words, I was in exactly the kind of position that, had I known how to do it, I could have been pushed into the sort of rebellious mode where I might have taken advantage of this. I mean, I can tell you for a fact that same year, I drove drunk, discharged a firearm inside the city limits, smoked marijuana, and jaywalked (on the way to the courthouse to pay a traffic ticket, I got a ticket for jaywalking!) So the slippery slope theory practically *required* me to do some securities fraud, right? Well, I didn't have any idea about that sort of thing, and I didn't exactly have a whole lot of money anyway. So I guess it's a good thing... Jeez, I just remembered, that was the same year I applied to the police department (I was desperate), and they almost took me! Holy cow.
That Michael J. Fox movie wasn't out yet, or "Wall Street" with the Sheens, but I must admit, after seeing that movie I fantasized about getting rich through questionable means:-)
(If my employer is reading this, I have since rehabilitated myself and can categorically assure you that I entertain no such notions, nor would I act upon them, were I in a position to do so.)
(If you worked for Safeway in 1986, I'm really sorry. I was too much of a punkass to recognize a human face on that paperwork.)
"The only way we'd ever see EPHI through outgoing mail is if someone were committing a violation anyway."
Right. I understand that. I realize the article is about *email* which is pretty much fair game anyway, but I wanted to do my part to help put out the fires of misunderstanding and disinformation that I perceived as starting to spread.
I haven't worked in healthcare personally, but I have plenty of experience in even more heavily regulated areas, such as international Oil and Gas law, and loss prevention in a company that has to take that stuff really seriously or people go to prison.
"The entire idea of anyone being mad that IT saw their info is ludicrous considering we are the ones that maintain the information systems that house the data."
I wouldn't assume that. It's an extra witness who would have to testify, when it comes to that. Could be a significant exposure. It's one thing to be in the server room, where you might happen to see privileged information, but it's another thing to be explicitly tasked with a role where you're required to observe privileged information. But I'm sure the people with exposure have considered the whole process end-to-end for *your* shop. I worry about some places, given some people's attitudes and misunderstandings.
"They are the reason that we'll be living in oppressive, draconian societies in the next 50 years."
You mean after China takes over the world, because corporations in the West were so busy looking for threats from their own employees that they forgot to be productive and seek profitability?
Seriously, if you've got the resources to do this kind of monitoring crap, you should be using those resources to do something for the bottom line. That's pretty much what I'd say if I were a board member and I got wind of this. And I will say it if it turns out I'm a stockholder in one of the companies doing it.
"We're required by FERC to record all electronic communications between the generation and marketing side of the house and the transmission side so that FERC can ensure that we're not price-fixing."
One of the most interesting things (to me) that came out of the Enron thing, was that there were many recordings, mostly phone conversations, between the traders and the power plant operators where the traders would ask the plants to reduce output (or sometimes shut down completely), in order for the price machine to make money for Enron.
The point is, that stuff was being monitored then, but it didn't do one bit of good.
"I can't imagine spending that money to read people's e-mail."
I can, if you're talking about a company that's circling the wagons. Easy to imagine someone like SCO doing it.
>Interception of someone else's mail or email is >illegal in the US.
In many situations, it's not improper, because it will be held that the email was theirs to intercept to begin with.
I am aware of quite a few exceptions where a blanket policy like the one described could be a serious infringement of certain types of legally mandated privilege. I've posted on this topic earlier with a few examples that I personally have seen in some of my own workplaces, but I've worked in a lot of law offices and for people like air and water quality engineers, safety and health and industrial hygiene, lobbyists, that sort of thing, so I have a bit of a different perspective.
Basically, I don't understand how it's tenable to place a lower level of authority (such as an IT manager, or a contracted security professional) in a position where he is privy to communication that is supposed to be confidential and originates from a high level of authority.
So do you put the HR department on the same mail server as the financial planning manager? Or do you spend the capital and get quagmired in the bureaucracy needed to manage separate systems so that your guys from Pinkerton can read the email from the tech support floor, but not from the director of overseas marketing? And where do you put that director's assistant?
This kind of arrangement becomes very complex very quickly, and there are certainly diminishing returns, or even, serious risks in attempting it. Don't even get me started about SOX compliance and the documentation and controls that would be needed if you were to actually propose this!
Now, on the other hand, if you get a waiver from each employee that part of the agreement is that your communication *may* be monitored, and they've signed all the standard paper respecting conflicts of interest, confidentiality and such, then you'll have grounds to monitor anyone you'd like, but it still isn't a foregone conclusion that it's proper to routinely monitor communications between an attorney and a client, between parties with fiduciary relationships, between a helthcare practitioner and a patient, or where any party to a communication might reveal information that could be a matter of interest to the SEC. And in a company of such a size that's considering the stuff under discussion, some or all of these kinds of communications are bound to occur. (Whether it's appropriate for any of them to use *email* is another matter).
I'm pretty sure you aren't allowed to listen in on an employee talking to his wife on his lunch hour, without a court order, and even then it should be a detective who does the listening, and it doesn't *matter* that it's your phone. But this protection doesn't extend to email in the first place.
I remember there was some debate in the 1980s as to whether sending a fax constituted a breach of attorney-client privilege, but I understand that it's been resolved, along with the standing of faxed contracts (they can be treated as originals, on a good-faith basis, so we started to be able to close real estate deals and so on by fax.)
I don't think there's enough case law yet pertaining to email. Maybe some of the anti-spam stuff will yeild some concrete rules.
IANAL, but I've worn enough hats working in enough law offices to have a pretty good idea what I'm talking about. And what I think I'm saying is, if I was on your board, and I got wind of this monitoring scheme, I'd have a lot of questions for our counsel -- and if I got the wrong answers, you wouldn't be reporting to the board for much longer:-)
"And what's to stop someone from saving some piece of information on a USB key, then sending that out by FedEx?"
If you're saying it's improper, or illegal for you to do so, then presumably what's supposed to stop you is an aversion to the consequences (losing your job, going to federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison, etc.)
What strikes me as odd on the "reading outgoing email" idea, is that, invariably, security personnel must be presumed trustworthy. But I don't understand how you can have this level of trust. Are they a higher level of authority than the people who they are monitoring? You're paying the internal security folks more, and holding them to higher standards, than the people they are policing? If I was on your board of directors and you told me a story like this, I'd have your head off.
They draw the line precisely where they are required to. What they might be able to read is one thing. What may be admitted as evidence in a civil court is another -- and that's where the line is drawn, if it comes to this.
Like you said, you balance your checkbook on your boss' laptop. Take computing out of the equation. You balance your checkbook on your boss' yellow pad. Sure he can see this, it's his yellow pad. However, there are limits to what he can *do* with this information. Unless your checkbook entries contain information that would persuade a judge to admit them into evidence, that's where it stops.
Fortunately or unfortunately, most employment relationships don't involve litigation, so these limits are rarely reached. But they tend to be very important when they are!
In some cases, the employee has an ownership stake, or screwing around will diminish his returns, or maybe there are very strict laws, or safety implications involved. Natural consequences that serve to keep people honest and focused on the success of the business.
Then there are employment situations where the conditions are adversarial, or even punitive. There are plenty of jobs where the management role is filled by someone who takes a great deal of satisfaction in the position of authority where he can continually belittle those under him, making sure they do as much work as possible for their $5.15 per hour before taxes, and reminding them that they can be without a job for the slightest reason.
One of these workers is going to be motivated to do as much for the business as possible, and the other one is only motivated to get the hell out of there, maybe not before stealing from the till or sabotaging the place.
I just which I could tell you which one was which, but I've seen it go both ways.
>Ever see a business that has a "No firearms >allowed" sign out front?
Where I live, it's legal and even commonplace for people to carry firearms, (either concealed or open). I don't disagree at all with this status quo, because I sincerely believe it reduces violent crime. There is substantial empirical evidence to support that belief, and I don't mean to get into it here.
But the point is, that around here, the "no firearms" sign is the property owner's way of establishing that he does not want them carried -- and the wishes of the proprietor *must* be complied with, and it's a very serious matter if you screw up. However, the proprietor is not subject to that rule, and his employees can be armed as well. And they often are.
I'm a long-haired, guitar playin', vw bus drivin peace&love hippie, but I'm in full agreement with those who claim "an armed society is a polite society". Yep. I don't even have a dissonance, because I don't think I'm holding opposing beliefs.
"Being creative and ingenious requries some freedom and privacy."
Being competitive and profitable requires you to pay enough attention to what's going on OUTSIDE your office, that you should not be able to afford the resources to turn the INSIDE of your office into the kind of bureaucracy that fancies itself to be some kind of quasi-military spy organization. If you're doing that crap, I guarantee you're not paying attention to something important, and you're spending resources that do nothing but subtract from the bottom line, and may even end up being the undoing of your little empire.
What steps do you take to ensure that the monitoring itself does not constitute a violation of the confidentiality provisions of the law? You are adding eyes to confidential material when you do this. It occurs to me that when you take information that had been between a health care practitioner and the patient, and you insert "4 programmers, a network admin, 2 help desk people, a production operator, 3 business analyst and a manager" in between them, you have violated the very spirit of the idea that the communication was supposed to be confidential!
What kind of bonding or licensing do you require for the IT staff?
"We're required by law to read the email of many employees, not to mention their IM conversations and their web traffic..."
What law is that, and how do you avoid complex interactions with the laws that require confidentiality between a parties with a fiduciary relationship?
Privileged correspondence, as between an attorney and a client, or a physician and a patient, or a broker and an agent, can carry privileges that do not have exceptions for an IT security manager, an HR manager, or a general manager, or anyone else. This could get sticky if a company made a ham-handed policy of putting a non-privileged party in the path of a privileged communication. There's a whole world of situations where it is improper for certain kinds of information to be shared, even if it is up a chain of management hierarchy, or at the command of a security department. The possibilities for conflicts of interest, breach of mandatory protocols, commerce codes, or insider information, are everywhere.
On the other hand, if you are certain that your policy does not tread on this kind of territory, and you monitor the information that goes out between say a department providing a routine, non-regulated service and the customers, you can of course monitor this communication, or at least, it will not be improper to ask the employee to consent to this monitoring.
I have a somewhat distorted viewpoint, I suppose, since much of my career has been spent as an IT professional attached to the Office of General Counsel for a multinational corporation, where my clients were attorneys, industrial health and safety engineers, air and water quality specialists, and lobbyists. In that environment there is no question that communication is guaranteed to be confidential, and absolutely must not be subjected to any sort of routine interception.
I don't see this as anything like a boundary case or as being unusual at all. But I'm sure I have a bias, and I may assume that more companies and organizations must maintain strict protocols on confidentiality, even within the enterprise.
While scanning the slashdot posts on this I saw HIPAA mentioned quite a bit. I suppose people assume it would be obviously proper to have a security group monitoring correspondence, but I'd expect it to be much more likely that this security group would constitute a violation, unless everyone in that group was permitted to be in the loop on every piece of correspondence. I sincerely doubt that *increasing* the number of eyes on every document will pass HIPAA muster. I certainly would not assume this to be okay. Are you seriously going to pay licensed physicians to man your IT security department? There's no way you're going to be able to outsource this role to Pinkerton or Wackenhut.
When it gets into information that is regulated under the CFR, you'd better not take for granted that merely being designated as "the employer" gives you special rights that trump the federal laws.
But don't listen to me. As I said, my experience with this stuff was in a context where the employees *were* the lawyers, and the communications were often of a very sensitive nature, and confidentiality was assured even to the extent that no-one, not the board of directors, not the FBI, and definitely not some random security manager, was allowed to snoop. But I don't think that's a special case. I think it delineates the reason why management personnel should not execute a plan on the assumption that their company is a kingdom and they are the monarch. There are *lots* of rules that say otherwise, and breaking some of which can lead to managers doing the perp walk if they cross the wrong lines.
"A camcorder that records onto a digital card is disposable...how?"
Proprietary battery? One-way moulded case containing the media? Real crypto?
Those of us who remember Super-8 film, remember paying $6.00 (1978 dollars!) for the three minute and twenty second film cartridge, and another $8.00 to develop it.
>Who needs a camcorder like that?
I'm sure if it's sold in the right shops at the right places, tons of people will buy them. They will be sold to people before embarking on day cruises (even people with real cameras hate seawater spray. Would you take your Canon XL2 on a Zodiac?) They will be bought dozens at a time for wedding guests or corporate meetings. How do you suppose a waterproof version would do at a dive or surf shop?
People pay $12.00 for a 24-exposure C41 camera today, and another $10-12 to develop the film. Hell, *I* have even done this, and I have a very good digital SLR, a good digital point-and-shoot, and a respectable film SLR system. I've still found reasons to buy these things from time to time, sometimes for the waterproof Kodak, sometimes only to avoid standing out or being singled out, and occassionally because I enjoy working within the limitations of a given medium.
Nobody "needs" a camcorder like that. But they will be purchased, along with bugspray, sunblock, and a bag of cheetos. I'm sure I'll even try one.
One thing though, if it does turn out to be hackable, I assume I'll never see one. Just like I never saw an Iopener or a CueCat or a Nintendo glove or a Juicebox.
Re:Now we will get "video" images from battlefield
on
Disposable Camcorder
·
· Score: 2, Informative
"considering that U.S. Army personnel are spending a year at a time in remote places, they're amassing quite a savings"
"However, you can be sure that when the court does take a case, that it involves all of the following: 1) a fundamental question of law, 2) that is being inconsistently decided by lower courts, and 3) that is ripe for adjudication by the Court (based on sufficient instances of the problem to guide them)."
You left out (4) States are getting uppity and the Bush Administration wants to put them down.
"On the other hand, I would dearly like to know what Jesus actually said during his life"
I'd be just as interested in knowing if he ever built anything as a carpenter, what kinds of wood were available, whether there were abundant hardwoods in the region at the time, and what kind of tools he used. I wonder if he had a chalk line or an iron hammer, or a serrated saw.
What judge signed this "takedown order?" If not a judge, then what authority did the person making the order have against the author?
It's important, because without authority, there was no "force"; government has a monopoly on the use of force.
I feel sorry for the author, not because he's being repressed by an unnamed party, but because he doesn't think it's important to stand up, even to a single test, for his rights.
He is in a hell of a good position, having NO MONEY TO LOSE, to simply stand up for his rights. Or even, ignore the orders until they arrive with a judge's signature. Which would not happen without some kind of hearing, in the US. Maybe the UK is a more barbaric place, where things like the rule of law and equal protection aren't considered, I don't know.
I just really don't understand how some random person gets this kind of authority against some other individual, unless the individual chooses to surrender that authority.
It does not appear that anyone was "forced" to do anything at all. On the contrary, it appears that the author *chose* to waive any rights he may have had. His choice. He won't even name the compnay? I *know* the company doesn't get *that* privilege without a court order.
It looks to me like the guy may have gotten tired of dealing with this product, and here's a good exit strategy to save some face. Abandon the project and look like a victim in the process.
Never, ever, ever, ever, sign anything that you would not choose to sign, without being ordered to do so by a judge. Copyright law may be strong these days, but not strong enough to give individuals even greater power than governments (we're expected to believe there was a summary judgement, and property coercively seized, without any due process of law.)
I just have to believe there's a lot more to the story than has been shared with us.
Because it's either that, or there's someone that would do whatever some particular lawyer told him to do (where do you draw the line? Torture puppies?)
I hope it's the former, because I can deal with there being more information than I have, but I *can't* deal with someone simply waiving all his rights on the assumption that lawyers can do bad things to him. Once you stand your ground and insist on *process*, the lawyers can do *nothing*, until a *judge* orders it.
Slashdot Mirror
"The number of consumers that shoot RAW is so low that it doesn't matter to them."
That's changing, with the increased popularity of cameras like the Canon EOS models, and also with the terriffic new ease of obtaining inexpensive, very high quality poster sized prints.
There are a lot of people who were pretty serious about photography, took a hiatus, and are getting back into it now that it's easy. This is the first time in their lives that the sort of quality that was once the exclusive domain of medium- and large-format cameras, is accessible.
And these people have no difficulty at all with the understanding that the RAW file is the digital equivalent of the film negative.
"It's black Tuesday all over again. Everybody sell, sell, sell! The market is about to collapse!"
It's possible that people made money overnight by accidentally holding positions that they intended to close. It's also possible that the error could compound the next day by creating problems at opening. It could conceivably cost a LOT of money to hold a position that you wanted out of when the market closed.
Don't gamble with borrowed money.
"The SEC also gets rather in a huff if traders are not closely monitored for violations of sections 16 and 20 of the Securities Exchange Act"
:-)
I've only been in a situation one time where this applied to me, with any degree of risk. Early in 1986 while working for Haynes & Boone, I knew about the takeover bid for Safeway. This wasn't revealed to the general stockholders/employees until the next quarter -- when they started receiving litigation documents and tender offers and stuff like that, that we were already preparing.
At the time, I didn't have any money or even much of an idea what could be done with this kind of information, but it was certainly made very clear to me that it would be a Very Bad Thing to discuss the minimal information I had with anyone outside the firm, or to do any trading based on the information. I'm sure at the time, just the idea that I could lose that shiddy job was enough to keep me honest. The only thing I was really aware of, was that I was part of the process of making a whole lot of people lose their jobs, and asking them to sell their stock at rock bottom price (or risk holding it to zero, I suppose). I remember it didn't bother me at the time, because I perceived these people as being in a higher class than I was in, what with their good jobs and having enough money to buy things like stock in a company. Hell, they probably owned late model cars, lived in houses, that sort of high-falutin' lifestyle. Here I was with a college degree working for a bunch of Texas assholes, not even making enough money to meet my modest expenses. In other words, I was in exactly the kind of position that, had I known how to do it, I could have been pushed into the sort of rebellious mode where I might have taken advantage of this. I mean, I can tell you for a fact that same year, I drove drunk, discharged a firearm inside the city limits, smoked marijuana, and jaywalked (on the way to the courthouse to pay a traffic ticket, I got a ticket for jaywalking!) So the slippery slope theory practically *required* me to do some securities fraud, right? Well, I didn't have any idea about that sort of thing, and I didn't exactly have a whole lot of money anyway. So I guess it's a good thing... Jeez, I just remembered, that was the same year I applied to the police department (I was desperate), and they almost took me! Holy cow.
That Michael J. Fox movie wasn't out yet, or "Wall Street" with the Sheens, but I must admit, after seeing that movie I fantasized about getting rich through questionable means
(If my employer is reading this, I have since rehabilitated myself and can categorically assure you that I entertain no such notions, nor would I act upon them, were I in a position to do so.)
(If you worked for Safeway in 1986, I'm really sorry. I was too much of a punkass to recognize a human face on that paperwork.)
"The only way we'd ever see EPHI through outgoing mail is if someone were committing a violation anyway."
Right. I understand that. I realize the article is about *email* which is pretty much fair game anyway, but I wanted to do my part to help put out the fires of misunderstanding and disinformation that I perceived as starting to spread.
I haven't worked in healthcare personally, but I have plenty of experience in even more heavily regulated areas, such as international Oil and Gas law, and loss prevention in a company that has to take that stuff really seriously or people go to prison.
"The entire idea of anyone being mad that IT saw their info is ludicrous considering we are the ones that maintain the information systems that house the data."
I wouldn't assume that. It's an extra witness who would have to testify, when it comes to that. Could be a significant exposure. It's one thing to be in the server room, where you might happen to see privileged information, but it's another thing to be explicitly tasked with a role where you're required to observe privileged information.
But I'm sure the people with exposure have considered the whole process end-to-end for *your* shop. I worry about some places, given some people's attitudes and misunderstandings.
"They are the reason that we'll be living in oppressive, draconian societies in the next 50 years."
You mean after China takes over the world, because corporations in the West were so busy looking for threats from their own employees that they forgot to be productive and seek profitability?
Seriously, if you've got the resources to do this kind of monitoring crap, you should be using those resources to do something for the bottom line. That's pretty much what I'd say if I were a board member and I got wind of this. And I will say it if it turns out I'm a stockholder in one of the companies doing it.
"We're required by FERC to record all electronic communications between the generation and marketing side of the house and the transmission side so that FERC can ensure that we're not price-fixing."
One of the most interesting things (to me) that came out of the Enron thing, was that there were many recordings, mostly phone conversations, between the traders and the power plant operators where the traders would ask the plants to reduce output (or sometimes shut down completely), in order for the price machine to make money for Enron.
The point is, that stuff was being monitored then, but it didn't do one bit of good.
"I can't imagine spending that money to read people's e-mail."
I can, if you're talking about a company that's circling the wagons. Easy to imagine someone like SCO doing it.
>Interception of someone else's mail or email is
:-)
>illegal in the US.
In many situations, it's not improper, because it will be held that the email was theirs to intercept to begin with.
I am aware of quite a few exceptions where a blanket policy like the one described could be a serious infringement of certain types of legally mandated privilege. I've posted on this topic earlier with a few examples that I personally have seen in some of my own workplaces, but I've worked in a lot of law offices and for people like air and water quality engineers, safety and health and industrial hygiene, lobbyists, that sort of thing, so I have a bit of a different perspective.
Basically, I don't understand how it's tenable to place a lower level of authority (such as an IT manager, or a contracted security professional) in a position where he is privy to communication that is supposed to be confidential and originates from a high level of authority.
So do you put the HR department on the same mail server as the financial planning manager? Or do you spend the capital and get quagmired in the bureaucracy needed to manage separate systems so that your guys from Pinkerton can read the email from the tech support floor, but not from the director of overseas marketing? And where do you put that director's assistant?
This kind of arrangement becomes very complex very quickly, and there are certainly diminishing returns, or even, serious risks in attempting it. Don't even get me started about SOX compliance and the documentation and controls that would be needed if you were to actually propose this!
Now, on the other hand, if you get a waiver from each employee that part of the agreement is that your communication *may* be monitored, and they've signed all the standard paper respecting conflicts of interest, confidentiality and such, then you'll have grounds to monitor anyone you'd like, but it still isn't a foregone conclusion that it's proper to routinely monitor communications between an attorney and a client, between parties with fiduciary relationships, between a helthcare practitioner and a patient, or where any party to a communication might reveal information that could be a matter of interest to the SEC. And in a company of such a size that's considering the stuff under discussion, some or all of these kinds of communications are bound to occur. (Whether it's appropriate for any of them to use *email* is another matter).
I'm pretty sure you aren't allowed to listen in on an employee talking to his wife on his lunch hour, without a court order, and even then it should be a detective who does the listening, and it doesn't *matter* that it's your phone. But this protection doesn't extend to email in the first place.
I remember there was some debate in the 1980s as to whether sending a fax constituted a breach of attorney-client privilege, but I understand that it's been resolved, along with the standing of faxed contracts (they can be treated as originals, on a good-faith basis, so we started to be able to close real estate deals and so on by fax.)
I don't think there's enough case law yet pertaining to email. Maybe some of the anti-spam stuff will yeild some concrete rules.
IANAL, but I've worn enough hats working in enough law offices to have a pretty good idea what I'm talking about. And what I think I'm saying is, if I was on your board, and I got wind of this monitoring scheme, I'd have a lot of questions for our counsel -- and if I got the wrong answers, you wouldn't be reporting to the board for much longer
"And what's to stop someone from saving some piece of information on a USB key, then sending that out by FedEx?"
If you're saying it's improper, or illegal for you to do so, then presumably what's supposed to stop you is an aversion to the consequences (losing your job, going to federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison, etc.)
What strikes me as odd on the "reading outgoing email" idea, is that, invariably, security personnel must be presumed trustworthy. But I don't understand how you can have this level of trust. Are they a higher level of authority than the people who they are monitoring? You're paying the internal security folks more, and holding them to higher standards, than the people they are policing? If I was on your board of directors and you told me a story like this, I'd have your head off.
Next.
>Where do most companies draw the line?
They draw the line precisely where they are required to. What they might be able to read is one thing. What may be admitted as evidence in a civil court is another -- and that's where the line is drawn, if it comes to this.
Like you said, you balance your checkbook on your boss' laptop. Take computing out of the equation. You balance your checkbook on your boss' yellow pad. Sure he can see this, it's his yellow pad. However, there are limits to what he can *do* with this information. Unless your checkbook entries contain information that would persuade a judge to admit them into evidence, that's where it stops.
Fortunately or unfortunately, most employment relationships don't involve litigation, so these limits are rarely reached. But they tend to be very important when they are!
Not all employment situations are equal.
In some cases, the employee has an ownership stake, or screwing around will diminish his returns, or maybe there are very strict laws, or safety implications involved. Natural consequences that serve to keep people honest and focused on the success of the business.
Then there are employment situations where the conditions are adversarial, or even punitive. There are plenty of jobs where the management role is filled by someone who takes a great deal of satisfaction in the position of authority where he can continually belittle those under him, making sure they do as much work as possible for their $5.15 per hour before taxes, and reminding them that they can be without a job for the slightest reason.
One of these workers is going to be motivated to do as much for the business as possible, and the other one is only motivated to get the hell out of there, maybe not before stealing from the till or sabotaging the place.
I just which I could tell you which one was which, but I've seen it go both ways.
>Ever see a business that has a "No firearms
>allowed" sign out front?
Where I live, it's legal and even commonplace for people to carry firearms, (either concealed or open). I don't disagree at all with this status quo, because I sincerely believe it reduces violent crime. There is substantial empirical evidence to support that belief, and I don't mean to get into it here.
But the point is, that around here, the "no firearms" sign is the property owner's way of establishing that he does not want them carried -- and the wishes of the proprietor *must* be complied with, and it's a very serious matter if you screw up. However, the proprietor is not subject to that rule, and his employees can be armed as well. And they often are.
I'm a long-haired, guitar playin', vw bus drivin peace&love hippie, but I'm in full agreement with those who claim "an armed society is a polite society". Yep. I don't even have a dissonance, because I don't think I'm holding opposing beliefs.
"Being creative and ingenious requries some freedom and privacy."
Being competitive and profitable requires you to pay enough attention to what's going on OUTSIDE your office, that you should not be able to afford the resources to turn the INSIDE of your office into the kind of bureaucracy that fancies itself to be some kind of quasi-military spy organization. If you're doing that crap, I guarantee you're not paying attention to something important, and you're spending resources that do nothing but subtract from the bottom line, and may even end up being the undoing of your little empire.
> This INCLUDES monitoring outgoing e-mail.
What steps do you take to ensure that the monitoring itself does not constitute a violation of the confidentiality provisions of the law? You are adding eyes to confidential material when you do this. It occurs to me that when you take information that had been between a health care practitioner and the patient, and you insert "4 programmers, a network admin, 2 help desk people, a production operator, 3 business analyst and a manager" in between them, you have violated the very spirit of the idea that the communication was supposed to be confidential!
What kind of bonding or licensing do you require for the IT staff?
"We're required by law to read the email of many employees, not to mention their IM conversations and their web traffic..."
What law is that, and how do you avoid complex interactions with the laws that require confidentiality between a parties with a fiduciary relationship?
Privileged correspondence, as between an attorney and a client, or a physician and a patient, or a broker and an agent, can carry privileges that do not have exceptions for an IT security manager, an HR manager, or a general manager, or anyone else. This could get sticky if a company made a ham-handed policy of putting a non-privileged party in the path of a privileged communication. There's a whole world of situations where it is improper for certain kinds of information to be shared, even if it is up a chain of management hierarchy, or at the command of a security department. The possibilities for conflicts of interest, breach of mandatory protocols, commerce codes, or insider information, are everywhere.
On the other hand, if you are certain that your policy does not tread on this kind of territory, and you monitor the information that goes out between say a department providing a routine, non-regulated service and the customers, you can of course monitor this communication, or at least, it will not be improper to ask the employee to consent to this monitoring.
I have a somewhat distorted viewpoint, I suppose, since much of my career has been spent as an IT professional attached to the Office of General Counsel for a multinational corporation, where my clients were attorneys, industrial health and safety engineers, air and water quality specialists, and lobbyists. In that environment there is no question that communication is guaranteed to be confidential, and absolutely must not be subjected to any sort of routine interception.
I don't see this as anything like a boundary case or as being unusual at all. But I'm sure I have a bias, and I may assume that more companies and organizations must maintain strict protocols on confidentiality, even within the enterprise.
While scanning the slashdot posts on this I saw HIPAA mentioned quite a bit. I suppose people assume it would be obviously proper to have a security group monitoring correspondence, but I'd expect it to be much more likely that this security group would constitute a violation, unless everyone in that group was permitted to be in the loop on every piece of correspondence. I sincerely doubt that *increasing* the number of eyes on every document will pass HIPAA muster. I certainly would not assume this to be okay. Are you seriously going to pay licensed physicians to man your IT security department? There's no way you're going to be able to outsource this role to Pinkerton or Wackenhut.
When it gets into information that is regulated under the CFR, you'd better not take for granted that merely being designated as "the employer" gives you special rights that trump the federal laws.
But don't listen to me. As I said, my experience with this stuff was in a context where the employees *were* the lawyers, and the communications were often of a very sensitive nature, and confidentiality was assured even to the extent that no-one, not the board of directors, not the FBI, and definitely not some random security manager, was allowed to snoop. But I don't think that's a special case. I think it delineates the reason why management personnel should not execute a plan on the assumption that their company is a kingdom and they are the monarch. There are *lots* of rules that say otherwise, and breaking some of which can lead to managers doing the perp walk if they cross the wrong lines.
>Trolls change tactics all the time.
Of course, but I'm sure I've seen reasonable, non-AC posts, threaded to the wrong subjects. Wish I had time to dig up some examples.
"A camcorder that records onto a digital card is disposable...how?"
Proprietary battery? One-way moulded case containing the media? Real crypto?
Those of us who remember Super-8 film, remember paying $6.00 (1978 dollars!) for the three minute and twenty second film cartridge, and another $8.00 to develop it.
>Who needs a camcorder like that?
I'm sure if it's sold in the right shops at the right places, tons of people will buy them. They will be sold to people before embarking on day cruises (even people with real cameras hate seawater spray. Would you take your Canon XL2 on a Zodiac?) They will be bought dozens at a time for wedding guests or corporate meetings. How do you suppose a waterproof version would do at a dive or surf shop?
People pay $12.00 for a 24-exposure C41 camera today, and another $10-12 to develop the film. Hell, *I* have even done this, and I have a very good digital SLR, a good digital point-and-shoot, and a respectable film SLR system. I've still found reasons to buy these things from time to time, sometimes for the waterproof Kodak, sometimes only to avoid standing out or being singled out, and occassionally because I enjoy working within the limitations of a given medium.
Nobody "needs" a camcorder like that. But they will be purchased, along with bugspray, sunblock, and a bag of cheetos. I'm sure I'll even try one.
One thing though, if it does turn out to be hackable, I assume I'll never see one. Just like I never saw an Iopener or a CueCat or a Nintendo glove or a Juicebox.
Oh, really?
Did your recruiting officer tell you that?
Lucrative gig, soldiering, eh?
>It has to be taken to a place to be "developed"
>onto a DVD. People aren't going to do that.
You've never worked in a photo lab. Your assumptions about what people won't do, are wrong.
I've noticed a disturbing trend in the last week or so, of slashdot replies apparently being attached to the wrong threads.
Anyone else notice that?
>It reminds me of that Dilbert
If it happened in a Dilbert strip, something very close to it probably really happened at someplace like MCI or Exxon.
"However, you can be sure that when the court does take a case, that it involves all of the following: 1) a fundamental question of law, 2) that is being inconsistently decided by lower courts, and 3) that is ripe for adjudication by the Court (based on sufficient instances of the problem to guide them)."
You left out (4) States are getting uppity and the Bush Administration wants to put them down.
"On the other hand, I would dearly like to know what Jesus actually said during his life"
I'd be just as interested in knowing if he ever built anything as a carpenter, what kinds of wood were available, whether there were abundant hardwoods in the region at the time, and what kind of tools he used. I wonder if he had a chalk line or an iron hammer, or a serrated saw.
"What the hell. It's 2005. Why wasn't the data encrypted in the first place?"
If you use crypto on your backup tape, you introduce an extra layer of risk.
What judge signed this "takedown order?"
If not a judge, then what authority did the person making the order have against the author?
It's important, because without authority, there was no "force"; government has a monopoly on the use of force.
I feel sorry for the author, not because he's being repressed by an unnamed party, but because he doesn't think it's important to stand up, even to a single test, for his rights.
He is in a hell of a good position, having NO MONEY TO LOSE, to simply stand up for his rights. Or even, ignore the orders until they arrive with a judge's signature. Which would not happen without some kind of hearing, in the US. Maybe the UK is a more barbaric place, where things like the rule of law and equal protection aren't considered, I don't know.
I just really don't understand how some random person gets this kind of authority against some other individual, unless the individual chooses to surrender that authority.
It does not appear that anyone was "forced" to do anything at all. On the contrary, it appears that the author *chose* to waive any rights he may have had. His choice. He won't even name the compnay? I *know* the company doesn't get *that* privilege without a court order.
It looks to me like the guy may have gotten tired of dealing with this product, and here's a good exit strategy to save some face. Abandon the project and look like a victim in the process.
Never, ever, ever, ever, sign anything that you would not choose to sign, without being ordered to do so by a judge.
Copyright law may be strong these days, but not strong enough to give individuals even greater power than governments (we're expected to believe there was a summary judgement, and property coercively seized, without any due process of law.)
I just have to believe there's a lot more to the story than has been shared with us.
Because it's either that, or there's someone that would do whatever some particular lawyer told him to do (where do you draw the line? Torture puppies?)
I hope it's the former, because I can deal with there being more information than I have, but I *can't* deal with someone simply waiving all his rights on the assumption that lawyers can do bad things to him. Once you stand your ground and insist on *process*, the lawyers can do *nothing*, until a *judge* orders it.