Date: Sun, 19 Jun 1994 22:27:23 -0700 From: nobody@kaiwan.com (Anonymous) carterm@spartan.ac.brocku.ca (Mark Carter) wrote:

...

Beyond that, unrestrained encryption is dangerous to corporations, because what's to stop a ticked off employee from encrypting everything in the office as revenge for some imagined slight?

If he was pissed off and wanted revenge, he would not waste his time encrypting it, he could just delete it, and/or steal all remaining copies.

Not necessarily. One could get in the habit of keeping all one's files encrypted, decoding only the material that one has to occasionally release in order to convince one's boss that one is doing productive work on one's computer. :-) Many times when one is fired, one does not have the option of logging in one last time. The boss taps you on the shoulder, and escorts you to human resources. While you are having your exit interview, the sysadmin is disabling your account. For instance, the emacs editor has a mode (see crypt++.el) that automagically prompts for a decryption key wheneve you open a file that appears not to be pure text, in case you want to pass it through crypt before editing it. Only in the editor's buffer does it ever appear in decoded form. On the disk it is always encrypted. If one got fired unduly, one's former bosses would have to ask for the key. Of course, the usual reason peopnle get fired is incompetence, so there may not be anything worthwhile laying around anyway. tw