On Wed, 27 Dec 1995 Jason D. Livingood/WSC@hks.net wrote:
To Whom It May Concern: I was curious as to where I might find some electronic freedom legal precedents. If, for example, an employer was planning to probe file systems on PCs in the off-hours and employees began encrypting their hard drives, what legal precedents would support the employees or would support the employer in blocking the encryption? Thanks for any info you can give me!!
You want to take a look at the ECPA (stands for Electronic Communications Privacy Act--I think). I don't have URLs handy, but it should be easy enough to find via Alta Vista or Yahoo. The way I understand it, though there are fairly strict limits on the snooping your employer can do, you waive more or less all your privacy rights if you sign a form saying you "consent" to the snooping. Your encryption question falls in kind of a grey area (most of the ECPA deals with reading people's email, etc.), but it's probably covered in there somewhere. I have very strong feelings about this subject, but I'll keep them to myself for now since I'm posting from work. We were all informed a week or two ago that Bear Stearns is now archiving every piece of email coming into or leaving the company. All I'll say here is that I disagree strongly with the views Tim May posted about employees' property rights, etc. (though we agree on most other things). --Dave. -- ******************************************************************************* Bear Stearns is not responsible for any recommendation, solicitation, offer or agreement or any information about any transaction, customer account or account activity contained in this communication. *******************************************************************************