Submission + - Recourse for Draconian Encryption Requirements? 3
CryoStasis writes: I work for a major hospital in the northeast. Recently the hospital has taken it upon itself to increase its general level of computer security. As a result they now require full disk encryption on any computer connected to their network on site. Although I think this stance is perhaps a little over exuberant most of these computers are machines that have been purchased with hospital funding. In the department that I work in however many of the employees (myself included) have their own personal machines that they bring to work every day. For obvious reasons we're rather reluctant to allow the hospitals IT staff to attempt installation of the encryption. Those who have allowed the encryption to be installed on their personal machines have had major problems occur afterwords using both Macs and Windows machines (ranging from severe/total data loss, frequent crashes and general slowness) which the hospital does very little to remedy. To make matters worse the hospital is now demanding that any machine which is used to check email (via email clients or webmail directly) be encrypted, including desktop style machines at home, which must be brought in to the IT department as they refuse to distribute the encryption software to the employees for install. By monitoring email access they have begun harassing employees who check email from off campus stating that their email/login access will be disabled unless they bring in their computers. I have no intention of letting these people install anything on my machine, particularly software which their IT staff clearly doesn't have a solid grasp of. Have other Slashdot readers come across this kind of a problem? Do I have any recourse, legal or otherwise, to stop them from requiring me to install software on my personal machines?
