The legacy of pen-and-ink classification schemes comes with some flaws. In the military, if it's that important to be stamped, you shouldn't be reading it in a public square at all. But the "confidential" stamp is what made it seem juicy. Without that stamp, the journalist wouldn't have been interested.
But, like most classified documents, I think this also bears out just how much we over-secretize. I like Assange's view on this: we seem to use secrets to maintain our own positions within certain networks more than we use them for anything like "the greater good".
The standards community is like this too. Just consider how many W3C working groups are secret, for example. You wouldn't believe how much push-back I get when I ask for everything to be public.
(The W3C even has a second level of secrecy known as "team", which even W3C members who pay $60,000+ every year don't get access to.)
I don't know the reasons that the W3C state, but I can see a reason for making some amount of the process behind closed doors: the 802.11 'pre-n' debacle. Vendors taking incomplete standards and running with them before they are mature enough to use. Of course there is also the opposite danger: vendors implementing their own 'standards' because the standards body is taking too long behind closed doors.
The implementors _are_ the working group. Standards organisations don't make up standards without the implementors. :-) (At least, not successfully. Some do try.)
Secret working groups aren't secret from the participants, so it wouldn't make any difference to the case you describe. Indeed, the 802.11 working group _does_ work in secret, yet still had the "debacle" you mention. (The IEEE as a whole is not a very open standards organisation.)
Also, hardware standards are a bit more difficult, but in software, you really want to have experimental implementations long before standardisation. Otherwise, you end up with technologies that really don't work so well in practice. But that's separate from the issue of secrecy.
When I was briefly a tech journalist, my boss showed me a great trick: Go to the lobby of the hotel during a conference and just listen. It's amazing how many people forget that others can hear everything they say into their bluetooth headset.
Here's my absolute favorite trick, though: Blow past the PR people, sales people, and models who typically staff tradeshow booths and find the lone engineer. Ask questions like, "What's your favorite cool feature that didn't make it into this release?" or "If you had 6 more months to work on it, what would you have done?"
Even engineers/product managers with some public relations training can't resist talking about that thing they spent months working on, but didn't make it into the final release.
Heh. I've been that engineer. You're dragged along for the technical support and help in getting set up, but god forbid you get invited along to all the fun parties and company-paid dinners. Those are for the salespeople.
So screw 'em. I'd talk openly to anyone who listened. But yeah, nobody tends to pay any attention to you once the show floor is opened.
Yea, I know. It is the PR 2.0 age, trying to control the message is just obsolete and fundamentally flawed nowadays. Believe me, this is not the only problem it causes.
Everywhere I go, I see people who look at confidential information on laptops that are facing a crowdfull of eyeballs. Better yet, many of them get up and leave for a smoke or a piss without locking their screen, leaving not only the juicy bits there for all to read but corporate hardware unattended and ripe for the picking. I also hear people divulge way too much information in public (usually while talking on a phone) such as routing numbers, credit card details and the like. People need more than a privacy screen. It's as if situational awareness is some kind of lost art.
We're talking about information being stolen via evesdropping or looking over shoulders, not by physically stealing the media the information is in. Linking to the google news results for "stolen laptop" is therefor irrelevant.
"leaving not only the juicy bits there for all to read but corporate hardware unattended and ripe for the picking." was indeed one of the threats I mentioned, and it happens all the time. It's relevant to at least part of the discussion. "Shoulder Surfing" is very low-tech. How often it's exploited for personal gain is anyone's guess. Is it really that hard to hit Windows-L when you have to step away for a moment? To lower your voice (or better yet, find a better time or place) before yelling your account numbers into that mobile phone of yours despite the fact that you're in a quiet coffee shop? To take one of the many open seats where your back is to a wall before you spent hours upon hours poring through corporate IP on that massive 18" laptop screen? Sure,it's a trade-off sometimes. It's not always quiet and the good "privacy friendly" seating isn't always available, and sometimes you forget to lock your screen but I see stuff that boggles my mind almost daily.
"I also hear people divulge way too much information in public...such as routing numbers, credit card details and the like...People need more than a privacy screen."
Would you believe...that technology to deal with this problem was actually invented in the sixties (for the intelligence community)?
And, while the original version was bulky, a portable version does exist. No doubt it could be updated for the 21st century.
I friend of mine at Google UK was issued with a privacy screen for his standard issue laptop and told on day one that he MUST use it whenever in a public space.
It was quite good. Sitting next to him in the pub I could see about 5% of his screen.
I bet there is a decent-sized market with untapped demand for laptops / "tablets" (http://paulgraham.com/tablets.html) with a built-in privacy screen mechanism. The hardware itself could be the screen, either by making the screen part of the case itself, or through the display which would enable people to read only from certain angles.
The "privacy screen" is a physical polarization filter - basically a fabric you put on your screen however you like.
I don't know of any electrical/mechanical process that could shift the state of fabric to block light at most angles.
If you buy a crappy laptop from a couple of years ago, you won't even have to buy a filter to render your screen unreadable from an angle that isn't perpendicular to the screen. :)
Everyone at Google who uses their laptop in a public place (heck, even on the company shuttle) should be using a privacy screen. However, doesn't mean that everyone is. :)
I actually don't know anyone that was issued a privacy screen and told they had to use it. Sounds like a good policy though. (Just offering my own data point here.)
It is so weird being in the commercial world now where people basically don't seem to care about things like this. I never do anything on airplanes or in cafes except read books, watch movies, etc., or other public-source material. Even personal/social email seems too personal to have on a screen in a shared environment. Open plan offices shared with people outside my company are just as bad, but at least then it is sometimes possible to hide in a corner or telephone closet. I've often ended up going outside to sit in my car to make phone calls.
When I was there it was standard practice to use a privacy screen when at conferences or travelling, and they were delivered to your desk for free if you asked.
"The Googler (I'll just use the masculine pronoun for convenience's sake) was sitting with his seat back up, while his neighbor's seat was leaned all the way back. This left a huge gap in between the seats, so that merely by looking straight ahead and turning my eyes slightly to one side I could see almost all of his laptop screen."
The author of this article is obviously lying, because if his seat was up and his neighbor's was back there would be no way to see his screen from behind. The author obviously didn't think this through well enough.
A LCD with the front polarizer removed will be pure white to anyone not wearing polarized glasses, obtainable for $5 in the sunglasses aisle at most drugstores.
Wow, journalists are pretty much like smug spies. It is disconcerting that I have to be constantly distrustful of people around me just in case they are interested in digging around into any of the organizations I belong to.
Not really -- either the information should be revealed to the public (in which case you don't have to be distrustful of them) or it shouldn't (in which case you should prevent them from learning).
But, like most classified documents, I think this also bears out just how much we over-secretize. I like Assange's view on this: we seem to use secrets to maintain our own positions within certain networks more than we use them for anything like "the greater good".