The Ryno Pen

I was going to post some small, snarky, everyday-life stuff, but my Goat Has Been Got.

As mentioned in the news this morning (MON 14 APR 2008):

The Federal¹ Government is considering new national security laws which would allow employers to check their workers’ computer use – such as emails – without the employee’s consent.

Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard says critical computer networks need to be better protected against cyber attacks.

^{[small elision by your humble blogonaut]}

“We want to make sure that they are safe from terrorist attack,” she said.

“Part of doing that is making sure we’ve got the right powers to ensure that we can tell if there’s something unusual going on in the system.

For one thing, there are already laws allowing interception of electronic communication by national security organisations, like this little gem for example:

TELECOMMUNICATIONS (INTERCEPTION) ACT 1979 – No. 114 of 1979

An Act to prohibit the interception of telecommunications except where specially authorized in the interests of security or in connection with inquiries related to narcotics offences, and for related purposes.

And doesn’t any sysadmin worth the title keep a watch on the mail and other traffic for anomalies?

Hey, given a motivated sysadmin and sufficient stupid online behaviour/ misuse of company systems/ [insert user folly of choice here], do you actually believe your work stuff goes unwatched?

It’s fairly safe to assume that nothing on a computer is private, if you draw the wrong sort of attention. There are so many ways to monitor traffic that I won’t go into them here. If you don’t know, you either don’t need to, or the joy of your own discoveries awaits you.

Your employer’s commodities belong to him/her/them anyway. You’re owned from square one.

Imagine being in the shoes of a certain laptop user whose online activities resulted in a bootup screen featuring a large cartoony girl performing an animated Hello Boys manoeuvre. Worse yet, it happened in front of a sysadmin (who was visiting the user on other, unrelated, company business).

You can’t call on any rights in a case like that, and bluff/denial/crying sick and departing immediately can only take you so far.

For your own good, Both My Readers™, treat it like somebody else is reading it. As my handy recognition diagram shows:

there are black ones as well as white ones, and all the scary legislation in the world doesn’t make a whit of difference. The only good news is there’s so many of you, and only so many of them: on a large, impersonal scale, anything that can’t be automated runs a low risk of interception.

Till some bastard makes it personal.

Footnotery:
¹ – Australian, of course

Endnotery:
Your humble blogonaut has witnessed the use of a Certain Product which can be easily applied to paper envelopes, with an interesting result… temporary transparency of the envelope! Once it dries the process reverses, with no obvious evidence of tampering.

I’ll get out of your way now. You can quietly blink Morse code at each other, but keep clear of the ceiling cameras.