Re: I-Banks as Miniature Police States

eee_eff — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 12:19:39 -0000

Apparently, a lot of corporate IT departments have found it necessary to ban a lot of consumer applications like Skype, webmail, and the iPhone from their networks because they’re required to monitor and record all of their employees’ communications, and it’s hard to do that with applications that aren’t specifically designed with employer monitoring in mind. This strikes me as profoundly stupid. If the goal is to prevent employees from leaking confidential information,

I don't think the only goal could be preventing confidential information from leaking.

I work at a company that has a policy of not using web mail for communications, because we want all emails to use an indexing system (called Newforma) that allow easy indexing and archiving of emails. That way, everyone who works on a given project can, if they are interested, see who is saying what to owners and contractors and vendors.

If the goal was to stop all "confidential" information from leaking they would have to stop access to laptops and usb drives, which everyone uses to take work home and work on at home. If we cut off all of those 'holes' (which we would have to do if they really wanted to keep all information "safe") we'd be at a competitive disadvantage with our competition. Plus someone would still probably find a way around it.

To be sure we do have a few projects for agencies (like the FBI) that operate under different rules, but the downside (loss of collaboration and reduced workflow) would be a major problem if we erroneously decided that all information was 'confidential'

The trick is to only classify the absolutely bare minimum of our files as 'confidential' which is the opposite of many locations, where the default is 'top secret' until proven otherwise.

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Re: I-Banks as Miniature Police States