How IT Pros Can Avoid Legal Trouble 230
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Peter S. Vogel reports on the kinds of inadvertent transgressions that could land IT pros into legal trouble without realizing it. From confidentiality and privacy negligence, to copyright and source code violations, IT staff are legally liable for a lot more than they might think — in some cases because the law will not stop at your employer, instead holding individual IT employees responsible for violations even if the individuals are just 'doing their job.' Worse, as the recent case against Terry Childs has shown, judges and juries are often not technically savvy enough to understand what IT pros do. 'That lack of understanding can lead them to conclude you're at fault or should have known better,' Vogel writes. 'After all, many people think anyone technical is a whiz kid or brainiac on any topic.'"
What legally questionable scenarios have cropped up at your job?
Liability (Score:5, Funny)
I'm liable for first posts.
Premeditated murder (Score:5, Funny)
I'm a medical equipment technician at a California corrections facility. My boss routinely asks me to kill people in cold blood, and I've been doing it for a few years now... there's a lot of paperwork and everything, but I'm not entirely sure it's legal.
Does anyone else have experience with being ordered to kill somebody as part of their IT duties?
Re:Liability (Score:5, Funny)
As long as you caught them forking children, I don't think anyone will mind.
Har Har (Score:4, Funny)
'After all, many people think anyone technical is a whiz kid or brainiac on any topic.'
Obviously, they've never visited slashdot.
It's not that hard... (Score:1, Funny)
Just make sure you never try to run an illegal instruction!
Re:Premeditated murder (Score:3, Funny)
Let Me Tell Ya 'Bout the Time We ... (Score:3, Funny)
What legally questionable scenarios have cropped up at your job?
I'm a software developer for one of the big automotive companies and we almost got into some legal trouble a while back. We had another team that would test the embedded code we put in there and we were always playing pranks on each other between the two teams. So one time, I wrote a procedure that cause the accelerator to randomly speed up with no user interaction. It was very very rare that the procedure would trigger and then I called it right in the middle of the main block of the embedded code. Anyway, they run a bunch of tests a day and on the like the fortieth day, John drove his car right through the wall of the testing facility! Oh my, what a hoot, I haven't laughed so hard since they air lifted him out. But then there was all this legal BS about somebody getting hurt and this and that. Those law-talking guys have no sense of humor. So I realized I had to go in and comment out that procedure. So all I did was go in and comment out the signature block ... or at least I think that took care of it, but maybe it was that fancy ECC crap the smart guy put in ... I wonder if anyone ever went back in there and totally cleaned it up? Oh well ... dodged a bullet there ... am I right?
Re:Liability (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Legally questionable scenarios? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Blackberry Enterprise Server (Score:4, Funny)
If the device is hooked up to a corporate BES server, then they can already read all of your sms / email.
I pointed this out to a friend that uses her personal blackberry to access her company e-mail. Her response was "So what?" Then I asked her, "Don't you use text messaging to order that dried up plant material that's illegal in all 50 states?"
She bought a droid the very next day.....
Re:Premeditated murder (Score:5, Funny)
When I had to do that, I couldn't live with the moral qualms, so what I did, I hooked up the kill mechanism to a web server, and created this animated ad where if you punched the monkey it would kill the person.
Re:It's not that hard... (Score:1, Funny)
A Blue screen of Jail may result...