On Friday 26 February 2010 10:43:29 am Andrew McNabb wrote:
> there's a sort of spectrum of types of monitored data, ranging from
> least-sensitive to most-sensitive.  You have to draw the line somewhere,
> and this is what seems reasonable to me:

(big snip)

Let me play devil's advocate again.  I agree key loggers, and everything are 
bad.  Reading plain text email, because of the nature of network traffic, 
has been ruled by courts as public.  If you encrypt it, then obviously it is 
private.  You can put a privacy statement in your email (and many companies 
do) to state it should be considered private.  If someone uses that 
information against you then you can use based on that privacy statement.

It is my understanding (and I could be completely wrong) that anything on 
the Internet or passing through a network is considered private only if you 
took precautions to keep it private.  So encrypt it, or put a disclaimer.  
As such, email is inherently insecure.

Just for the record,

- BYU does not use key loggers
- BYU does not crack SSL/TLS sessions
- BYU does monitor plain text traffic on its network

This reminds me of a problem my brother had with his then 18 yo daughter.  
She would post on her non-password protected blog that she skipped school, 
didn't go to work, and spent all day with her friends.  When he would come 
home he would ask her how school went and she would say it went well.  Then 
he would confront her for skipping school and work.  She would then complain 
that he was reading her private blog and he shouldn't be reading it.  He 
would tell her to put a password on it but she complained that then her 
friends wouldn't be able to read it.

Now think about this: she posted something into a public network and got 
upset because her father was "snooping" into her publicly posted comments 
which were put there for everyone, except her father.  Go figure!

What I see happening makes my head spin.  Everyone is putting photos, 
videos, tweets, etc. out on the Internet for everyone to enjoy except those 
we don't want to see it.  What precautions do we take to make sure everyone 
can see it except person 1 and 2?  None.  This goes along with all those 
reports of people posting something on Twitter or Facebook which an employer 
later reads and uses it as a basis for termination.

-- 
Alberto Treviño
BYU Testing Center
Brigham Young University
--------------------
BYU Unix Users Group 
http://uug.byu.edu/ 

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