Employer Probing Precedents?

[David Mandl]

On Wed, 27 Dec 1995 Jason D. Livingood/WSC at 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.



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