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Comment by q1w2 | Hacker News Reader

I suspect the reaction from a lot of companies is going to be to lock down internal documents under a need-to-know security model.

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Easier said than done though. My wife works for a massive company that now makes you classify every email as external, internal, or confidential and after numerous emails, training and constantly calling people out on things, nobody can still figure out the difference (and thus marks everything far less secure than it is), despite it being trivial.

That's pretty much what happened after Snowden, everything is much more locked down, access is tightly controlled and employees are more closely monitored.

That's why I'm glad he released as much as he did, any followup whistle-blower leak is bound to be much much harder.

That also happened somewhat under Sabanes-Oxley and HIPAA. Documents that might have once sat in an unlocked filing cabinet are now locked in vaults.

Well if the precedent from this is any employee can leak whatever they want, violating their NDA and claim the company is committing securities fraud by having secrets why wouldn't they?

And greatly reduce their efficiency

That helps the public good too.

My tinfoil theory about the outage yesterday is that it was done on purpose, as a way to create an opportunity to "hide" as many internal documents as possible without anyone noticing.

First reaction: That really is tinfoil, if you don't include how the outage would help in that process..

Second reaction: Huh, employees were locked out of their offices, VPN was surely down, yeah if there was someone inside the data centre deleting files off their Intranet no one from outside the data centre would be able to notice, due to the lack of connectivity.

But it would have to be a very good scrubbing and people would notice things missing anyway, "Hey wasn't there used to be a PDF here..?". Hah, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_hole

Man, you could delete random 200 documents I worked on at least 3 months ago and I would only notice if I followed a broken link...

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