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List:       best-of-security
Subject:    BoS: e-shimmy
From:       Julian Assange <proff () suburbia ! net>
Date:       1995-10-19 23:12:03
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Date: Thu, 19 Oct 1995 06:36:14 -0700
From: "self@usa1.com" <self@usa1.com>
Subject: A new twist (or shimmy) on video E-mail

An article by Brian McGrory entitled "E-mail as evidence" in *The Boston
Globe*, 19 Oct 1995, p.1, (the article discusses this and also the issues
about companies' right to read employee E-mail) had the following anecdote,
which seems made for RISKS:

  ...A high-level executive with a Manhattan health company had a new
  technology that allows users to tape themselves with a tiny camera
  built into their monitor, send it through the system, and have it
  appear on the recipient's screen as a talking, moving image [sounds
  like a Connectix camera on a Macintosh to me].
     One night, arriving at her hotel, she flipped open her portable
  computer and began recording such a message.  Sitting before her
  laptop in the privacy of her room, she teasingly disrobed, performed
  what a corporate lawyer later would describe as a "shimmy," and
  purred to the intended recipient, a fellow married colleague, "Hurry
  to the hotel and here's what you get tonight."
     Problem is, she struck the wrong button on her computer, and the
  video flashed on the screens of more than 400 employees throughout
  her health company -- subordinates, bosses and people who had never
  met her before."

The article goes on to describe how bootlegged copies of the message was
distributed around the company, and appeared on floppy disks sold at
computer fairs.  [Health fairs, too, perhaps?  PGN]

And I thought Oliver North had set the record for embarrassing E-mail
screw-ups.

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