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Re: Zimmerman/Viacrypt
At 01:25 AM 6/15/96 PDT, Edgar Swank <[email protected]> wrote:
[snip]
>Seems to me an employer has a perfect right to monitor his employee's
>work product, for which he's being paid a salary and using the
>employer's equipment (like business PGP). If the employee doesn't
>like it, he's free to seek employment elsewhere (or start his own
>business). Or he's free to encrypt all his personal Email at home
>with a personal copy of ViaCrypt or a copy of free PGP.
Sometimes these workplace privacy issues are really hard for me to come to a
clear decision on.
I don't know how many of you have been in a workplace where someone quit by
just walking out in the middle of the day, but I have. Things would have
been really messy had the person left encrypted data lying around that the
company had no key for. It probably wouldn't have been hard to get a judge
to make the employee give up the key (after getting the judge to understand
what the hell encryption is...), but the time lost might have had a real
impact on project deadlines.
I'm not sure what the answer is, but I have a feeling that as an employer I
probably wouldn't want to provide encryption that I had no key for. What if
an employee died suddenly, and I needed access to their records/email?
Perhaps a somewhat enlightened employer could opt to split the escrowed key
up and pass it along to several people in the office, to help prevent
management from just spying on everyone.
Phil's feelings about PGP are a different matter, though. If he feels it
shouldn't be used that way, and that Viacrypt has violated their agreement,
then he should pursue it, IMHO. It doesn't necessarily follow that he's
just using it as an excuse to wrest the commercial version from them. He
may feel they really have gone beyond what was agreed upon. I suppose it
will be up to the courts to decide whether the escrow system is a "back
door" or not.
Rich
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