That has never been the justification for use of binding arbitration, at least in any significant way. The primary justification for mandatory binding arbitration is to save the corporations who are frequently the target of ligation the costs of having to defend themselves in court. Nobody is really shy about admitting that since the courts (the real courts) and congress have pretty much given their blessing to the arbitration system.

I don't know how often the RIAA/MPAA actually screw up when sending out these violation notices but I'm going to guess that their accuracy rate is pretty high. The vast majority of people who get caught are guilty. Having to deal with a "strike" is far far better than having to deal with a civil judgement or an out of court settlement. I stand by that statement even though I fully agree that the strikes system lacks any modicum of fairness such as a chance to confront your accuser, a chance to present a rebuttal, call witnesses, present evidence, and etc.

If you go through the court system, you're going to end up losing a lot of money even if you are innocent and get a judgement in your favor. Even if you are granted attorney's fees, which doesn't happen that often, you're still out all the time you wasted in court going through litigation.

But consider this: how likely is it going to be that you not just get one false strike against but a total of six? Extremely unlikely. By the time you start racking up multiple strikes, the statistical odds of you not being guilty of copyright infringement is essentially zero.

Should have zero impact in theory.

The RIAA/MPAA are paying contractors to join bittorrent swarms and collect IP addresses of users sharing infringing content. They don't own the copyright to any Linux distro or Wikipedia distro so they should not be initiating an enforcement action against you for this.

Of course it's entirely possible that they can screw up and get their torrents confused and report everyone who is sharing a 'Wikipedia' repository as somebody sharing the latest Bieber album. In that case, you pretty much have zero recourse because there is no built in appeals process. But you have six strikes at least...

Is that really true? Technically yes, you have your chance at getting due process before the courts.

If you're innocent: you're going to end up having to pay a lawyer and deal with the massively expensive legal system.

If you're guilty: you'll more than likely settle out of court for 3-4 grand, which is likely way more than the supposed losses suffered by the recording industry for your individual act of downloading and sharing.

If you end up in court in either situation and lose, chances are they will go for the full penalty, which can be in excess of $100,000 all for a single album. Sorry, I don't have the court cases at hand here, but I remember Slashdot covering some of these cases where the recording industry was awarded extremely ridiculous sums of money in comparison with a reasonable person's account of their actual damages.

The legal system is stacked against the common person in these situations.

The "6 strikes" system is problematic, yes. But it may end up saving a lot of people from having their wallets drained.

Someone who opens mail envelopes at work that were marked "private" will get fired or even imprisoned. SSL traffic is also marked "private". Why should that be different?

Because there is no legal expectation of privacy at the office. This has been litigated in the past and courts have ruled in favor of the employers.

SSH can be MITM'd just like SSL.

And if you're using *their* computers, how do you know they aren't running monitoring software on the workstations?

I think the important point to take home is that while there are ways to get around these transparent proxies that they cannot ultimately defeat, it is surely going to be logged and likely set off an alarm bell somewhere that you're tunneling garbage or seemingly-random data. Ultimately, the result of a proxied SSL session should be lots of recognizable text, maybe some graphics, and possibly email attachments. If what they see is something else, then it's clear someone is trying to rig the system.

You're on company property using their resources, they're free to kick you out once they see you're trying to hide information from them.

Of course, if the point is to STOP all leaks, then obviously they cannot do that as your method would allow you to leak information before you can be stopped. But you will be flagged.

A former employer of mine (publicly traded) used to proxy all IM conversations. The technology they used wasn't quite as clever and robust though. Basically, they would just create their own A records in the company's DNS server for the various IM servers (Yahoo, AIM, MSN, etc.) that point to an internal appliance. The internal appliance would proxy the connection and sniff all the conversations.

They made it quite obvious because every time you logged in, you would get an automatic IM from " IM Administrator" informing you that the logging was taking place.

It was very easy to bypass though - either set the correct IP addresses in the hosts file of your PC or plug the IP addresses into your IM client. This was necessary sometimes because those of us with Linux workstations would not be allowed to use IM because our Linux workstations didn't have Active Directory computer accounts (used for tying AD users to IM conversations).

They didn't do any webmail logging though.

Not sure what policy mandated this. We were not in a sensitive industry like finance, healthcare, or defense. Just a medium-sized software company. May have just been IT's interpretation of SOX compliance requirements.

That's not entirely accurate (re: Google). Your search query has to go to Google's servers, where it might be logged and seen by someone at Google.

I tend to think it would be difficult to leak too much to Google that way (the search box only takes so many characters of input) but if you're paranoid enough it is a valid leak vector to worry about.

There is NO expectation of privacy on a private network.

Not really. The spooks want to attack the platform the enemy is using and will have high value in comprimising.

Linux and Mac computers don't manage the SCADA system in Iran's enrichment plants, nor do their military commanders, bureaucrats, and etc. use Linux or Mac computers on a day to day basis.

Both Linux and Mac OS have had their share of embarrassing exploits.

To write proper documentation, I need to have access to the systems that you propose I should be shut off from. I don't have memory of the exact syntax of commands and etc. Further, if you don't trust employees with system access why do you trust them to be in the office to not do something untoward?

And this is supposed to accomplish what? Pull a keyboard off an absent coworker's workstation.

I don't dispute or disagree that word would get around or even think its a bad thing, but the employee may have grounds for a lawsuit if he finds out that there is some behind the scenes talking going on.

How can you be forced to wipe your personal laptop? What if you refused? Unless the company is offering me a decent severance, they're not getting that level of cooperation out of me when I'm being shown the door.