🚀 go-pugleaf

joet@dcatlas.dot.gov (Joe Trott) writes:

>jpglori@srv.PacBell.COM (John P. Gloria) writes:

>>Apparently when Wang resigned, his MCI Mail account was closed.  According
>>to the paper, MCI Mail saves messages for five days and then deleted. All
>>these came to light when a staff worker was closing the account and "looked"
>>into Wang's account and was suprised on the contents of the messages.  This
>>started court orders to search offices/residences on both parties. 

>>Question:  did the staff worker have the RIGHT to read Wang's email?
>>When I close accounts, I tar everything to tape and then remove everything.
>>I don't have time to read user's files or email that is still in queue.

>No, he did *not* have the right (unless a prior contract specified otherwise)
>to view Wang's email.  He should be prosecuted, found as guilty as he is,
>and treated as harshly as possible.  That said, the evidence that Wang was
>involved in crimes of his own *exists*.  It cannot be ignored.  Two wrongs
>do not make a right.  Wang should also be tried, convicted, and probably
>shot ("if you don't like the consequences of your actions...").

When i was one of the LAN administrators for a medium sized company, we
didn't *have* a policy on such things (though we were agitating to get
the higher ups to *set* one)

What we did when closing a user account was nuke the email, make a quick
pass through their directories and nuke anything that appeared to be personal,
and make a scan for files marked as being owned by them elsewhere. 

After cleaning up the "personal" stuff, and nuking "irrelevant" stuff
(like config files for various programs), any remaining files were referred
to their supervisor to see if they were "needed". (ie for their replacement
or as general company data, sday a process spec the person had been writing).

Anything that wasn't "needed" got nuked. 

Yes, we read "private" files. But it was our job to cleanup the account,
and better *us* than their supervisor! I frankly couldn't have told you
the next day what had been in 90% of the files that got deleted as 
"personal". 

In fact as I had occasion to tell users who were worried about the fact that
I could read any file on the LAN "There are something like 4 gigabytes of
files out there. *Thousands* of them. Even if I *wanted* to snoop, there's
too much to go thru!"


-- 
Leonard Erickson		      leonard@qiclab.scn.rain.com
CIS: [70465,203]			 70465.203@compuserve.com
FIDO:   1:105/51	 Leonard.Erickson@f51.n105.z1.fidonet.org
(The CIS & Fido addresses are preferred)