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Importance of Information Assurance
The story of the deaths of 12 miners in West Virginia leads much of the media today. Unfortunately there was a bitter twist to this story when the families of those miners were initially told that 12 of the miners were found alive, only to later find out that only one of the 13 miners survived. Understandibly, the grief stricken families were outraged at how this could happen. The mining company and many others are struggling to find out how this tragic miscommunication occurred and why it wasn’t fixed sooner. The initial take seems to be people with cell phones leaked the erroneous information out and it spread like wildfire.
All of this sounds very familiar to military personnel, who had to grapple with families and the media being preemptively told of casualties before the official word came down. This situation begs debate on how do we balance free speech with information assurance in a situation like this? Are private companies and organizations entitled to demand secrecy about ongoing operations as military and government organizations can?
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Usually not worth it by markmcb
I don’t think most companies will ever try to stop this sort of thing because it’s simply not worth the effort. Consider this mining company. How often do you think they have an event anywhere close to this level of publicity? They probably never thought anything this big would happen. But let’s say they did. What could they have to do to prepare?
Cell phones are a must these days. Perhaps they could get phones that can only call internally to the company, but what about their business needs on non-emergency days? Chances are that they’ll need outside lines. The only other viable option would be to have some sort of policy that outlines "communications blackouts" in which no information should be transmitted outside of the company, but then how do you practice this and make people aware? If you’ve worked in the company for 5 years with no emergencies, chances are that you have never even heard of this policy, or it’s been so long since you heard about it that it no longer has any meaning. I suppose you could add training to your schedule, but training for something unlikely to happen is money lost. Unlike the government or military, companies have to produce something and sell it to stay afloat. They can’t just shut down "just in case."
So, in summary, I think that unless you could issue some sort of company phone to all employees, ban private cell phones, and have a control feature to shut down the numbers that the company phones could dial, you probably don’t have many good options.