First, if you have a laptop/PC/PDA that you got as an employee or executive (especially) of a company then how it's used is per company rules and what's on it is company property, period, with very few exceptions. If you don't want the company looking over your shoulder, don't put in on the device on the first place. Don't send personal emails, keep personal addresses, load personal software, files, etc., get your own. Want to change it, get enough money to influence your own set of congress critters.
As for this issue there are several other possibilities. SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley) a law passed after the Enron mess for public companies, plus court decisions made about civil suits allow a plaintiff to include the contents of that company device (the laptop, plus any files at the person's home) in a dicovery motion. SOX requires a policy and process for electronic records of a company (especially those of an officer or executive). Anyone that destroys these records outside of company policy puts the company in violation of SOX (look at Morgan-Stanley and other wall street brokers in trouble stories) and opens the company to a big fine, etc. If SOX did not apply here, then the company may have had notice of a law suit being brought against them (opposing lawyers send this to the target company ahead of filing the lawsuit to ensure information is retained) and the laptop in question being in the hands of an executive would has fallen under the rules of don't dump any info on it now. Any info destroyed (which can be proved to be removed like on the laptop, the software showed the oppuntunity) can be claimed by the plantiff to contain the worst case data. Judges have supported this, message to companies, don't delete anything. This is becoming the thinking of companies, delete only under strict policy and then only if no possible lawsuits are going to use the data.
To summarize, this could have been a case of an ex-employee (executive level) trying to jump-start a competitng entity with info from the current employer or he may have just been using the laptop to communicate with his new job and maybe do some work while still at the old job or it could have been SOX/Legal worries of the company or it could just have been a pis*ing match that got out of hand and now will affect many more persons.
Slashdot Mirror
First, if you have a laptop/PC/PDA that you got as an employee or executive (especially) of a company then how it's used is per company rules and what's on it is company property, period, with very few exceptions. If you don't want the company looking over your shoulder, don't put in on the device on the first place. Don't send personal emails, keep personal addresses, load personal software, files, etc., get your own. Want to change it, get enough money to influence your own set of congress critters.
As for this issue there are several other possibilities. SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley) a law passed after the Enron mess for public companies, plus court decisions made about civil suits allow a plaintiff to include the contents of that company device (the laptop, plus any files at the person's home) in a dicovery motion. SOX requires a policy and process for electronic records of a company (especially those of an officer or executive). Anyone that destroys these records outside of company policy puts the company in violation of SOX (look at Morgan-Stanley and other wall street brokers in trouble stories) and opens the company to a big fine, etc. If SOX did not apply here, then the company may have had notice of a law suit being brought against them (opposing lawyers send this to the target company ahead of filing the lawsuit to ensure information is retained) and the laptop in question being in the hands of an executive would has fallen under the rules of don't dump any info on it now. Any info destroyed (which can be proved to be removed like on the laptop, the software showed the oppuntunity) can be claimed by the plantiff to contain the worst case data. Judges have supported this, message to companies, don't delete anything. This is becoming the thinking of companies, delete only under strict policy and then only if no possible lawsuits are going to use the data.
To summarize, this could have been a case of an ex-employee (executive level) trying to jump-start a competitng entity with info from the current employer or he may have just been using the laptop to communicate with his new job and maybe do some work while still at the old job or it could have been SOX/Legal worries of the company or it could just have been a pis*ing match that got out of hand and now will affect many more persons.