Sunday, March 26, 2006

Suing former employees

There was recently a post in the employment law blog, suits in the work place (http://suitsintheworkplace.com/blogs/archive/2006/03/14/78.aspx) that I found particulary interesting, which talked about International Airport Centers, LLC v. Citrin, No. 05-1522, 7th Cir. March 8, 2006.

This is just one of many expamples where the politicians who are writing laws about technology, don't exactly know what they are doing. The real problem is probably that they try and leave the laws that they are writing particularly vague to allow them to be adappted to new technologies, but at the same time means that they may be applied to situations that were not intended.

The case above refers to an employee who was using his company laptop to help start a company while he was still working for his old company, which probably was not a good idea. When he left the company was not happy because he decided to delete everything that was on his computer, using a program. This deleted everything on his computer including files that were on his computer that the company did not have duplicates of. Because of this fact, the company used a provision in the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 18 U.S.C. ยง 1030, to charge the employee. The employee according to his contract was allowed to return or destroy the data on the laptop.

In the computer world first of all there is a very big difference beween deleting information and destroying information. If he wanted to destroy information he would have to load a program, because windows does not have an adequate means of doing this. (when you delete something on a computer you are really only deleting the index of the information and allowing the computer to write over the information the next time space is needed)

The origninal law was written to protect malicious hackers and employees to loading programs onto company machines without anyones knowledge. While the company did not know what was going on the rules that applied to the personal laptop seemed to allow what was permited.

Hopefully when the suit is reinstated the employees lawyers will be able to defend the employee, because this could be a very problematic situation for any one who uses a similar program. If someone wanted to destroy classified information there would be no way to do so, because there is a possibility that there will be a problem since you can't prove what you were destroying.

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