Corporate spying

Bruce Schneier covers corporate spying today - you know, when your employer or your shop uses spying methodology to learn to know you better. I only wish this was new - government trained security specialists have crossed over to private business since the dawn of time.

Since you do not have to work for the government to have a license to kill - it is enough to be a hired gun - and the number of specialists increases, it is only natural that some accepts tempting offers from the corporate world.

What is more - there is nothing strange in a company - big or small; to protect itself. The challenge is to be able to draw the line - where do you stop? Is it OK to have Wall-Mart or HP to install wiretaps on you (or someone else)? If not - when would it be OK? If you think it is just fine, when would it NOT be OK anymore?

We know that most companies today use computers to track everything related to it's production, logistics and sales. Why is it so chocking to read that they are using computers to analyze and track that information too? After all, Business Intelligent and Data warehousing is nothing new under the sky.

From the article:


The fact that they let you know some of their thresholds may raise a few eyebrows, but again - if you are a smart criminal, you would not use a clean ID to buy your batch of prepaid phones, now would you? Most likely you would use someone else's CC?

When your company is large enough, you start spending money on security. And security in this sense means you put into action counter-measures and information gathering. When your company is larger than some countries, it would be quite expected that you use some of the same measures to protect your assets.

I think it is unavoidable. We keep introducing tools that facilitate the collection, storing and analyzing of data. Obviously some will collect and analyze more data than others. Surely this will continue. And most importantly, most people do not care.