Essentially it belongs to no one. To be really old school slashdotty, if you have knowledge and share it with me, you still have the knowledge. Given these guys' tenure, they likely have a decent retirement set up to fall back on. I wouldn't train Someone to kill my job, though everyone has their price. A weeks pay for every year of my tenure? No. A couple of years' pay? I'd be a fool not to. Employers have had employees over a barrel for some time now. 20 years ago, everyone got a raise in the company, just because. Not because of any laws or anything. How many places do you think do that today? Hell, we don't even get the chocolate sampler anymore,(Those were actually quite good.) They even got rid of employee of the month in a facility with a few hundred employees. It's real hard to feel sorry for employers who are at a disadvantage in things that they think will make more money. And there is stuff that is not paid to learn stuff. "That router in this part of the building usually needs to be power cycled every month, but otherwise it's solid." "John Corproratate Director brings in infected usb's every once in a while, keep an eye on his traffic and gently warn him."

How is that different from the status quo?

There really is a lot you can't do. Consider, the whole IPhone flap wasn't geared to really stop anything, just find out what happened. You think if there was any serious plans on that phone that they wouldn't have changed the moment any supposed co-conspirators caught wind that the FBI was going to crack the phone? You might catch some people, but they likely would just be running. With that,I'm for doing something if its realistic, perhaps minimal media exposure, and just plain sucking it up. If its not an effective tactic, then it will be used less. And weeks long exposes only give the killers what they ultimately want: attention. I do however,think there is absolutely the responsibility to tell them what they cannot do. I say that they should not have the keys to the kingdom, because eventually copies of those keys will get out. Someone will eventually pick the lock anyway. There will be future attacks I'm sure. I don't want there to be any, but I'm about as hopeful that no one will slip in the tub and die ever again.If the fbi has open access to encryption, bad guys will just use other means, and then everyone's data is at risk.

No, you are not already paying for that stuff. Your IT Dept. recommends to procurement what to buy, and you kind of glossed over the cost of a server and the associated costs. Not to mention who pays for it. I already addressed the scale of the company, and in spite of what you can do, IT still has to learn how to do it,(maybe,) and maintain the server which costs power, parts usage, and possible overtime. Although I don't work in IT, I serve internal customers, and we try to give them what we can. New equipment costs money, however, and new equipment like air conditioners, printers, floor space, and yes, software and hardware all cost money. These are all things that sales and other departments sometimes need. And no, just cause you already budgeted for a department doesn't mean that that budget shouldn't change. This is just me talking to myself anyway. Cheers.

No, you didn't take that far enough.

Of course, that would require IT to buy, install, administer these simple tools, maybe take the time to learn how to use tools, which is not free, and for the requesting department to fund all of it, and we all know that is asking too much.

That last part about funding is the sticking point. Sure, there is some stretch room for manpower, but it all costs money. Everyone has to justify their budget, from marketing, to sales, to IT, to software engineering, to industrial hardware support, to archiving, to facilities maintenance, to HR, to legal, and to probably other things that I am likely forgetting.

As a caveat to those who talk about IT being a cost and sales bringing in the money, I am not in IT. For any company to be even moderately successful, you must be a team. Get rid of any relevant department to your company above, and it will fail. No toilets? No PBX system? No intranet? No Internet? No Email? Your PC not functioning? No heating/air conditioning? No copier/printer? Signing contracts without legal advice? And on and on?

You are fucked.

Granted this is not as important at 5 employees. Think about 500 employees,or 5000.

And I have a slight problem with sales in any company over about 50 people or so. They will gladly srew over the customer and 70% of their workforce for their own benefit.

Grandparent gets an F and parent gets a D-. The earth, sun and moon don't weigh anything, unless they are sitting on a scale. They do, however, have mass. Submitter gets a basic B because he was trying to relate the actual differences in an understandable way.

Ten years ago, you would have had a point. Today, not so much. I built a new gaming pc about six months ago, before that I built a gaming pc about 3.5 years previous to that. To expound on that, I built a pc 3.5 years ago that I never upgraded. I went from ddr1 to ddr3 and dual core to more highly advanced quad core, along with a single gpu card to a dual gpu card. Did it cost more money? Undoubtedly.Was it worth it? Undoubtably. I just quit falling for the benchmark trap, and still enjoyed higher qualty gaming.