Restricting photocopying?

["Geoff Hart (by way of \"Eric J. Ray\" <ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com>)" <ght -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Steven Jong <<...would like to keep some of the information out of
the hands of professional frauds, and it struck me that if we could
restrict photocopying of draft documents, that might help. We played
around briefly with ink colors that resisted photocopying, but didn't
find anything effective. Do you have any suggestions to offer on how
to restrict the flow of information?>>

The bottom line with any "security" system is that the weakest link
is rarely the technology: it's almost always the people. If you can't
get your colleagues to respect the need for secrecy, no technological
solution is going to do anything more than discourage amateurs.
Worse yet, you probably won't do much more than inconvenience the
pros. One solution I really, really liked may unfortunately be
apocryphal: a few years back, some software company whose products
were routinely being pirated apparently released a virus-infested
version of their latest release onto the pirate BBS (kind of a
pre-Internet FTP server cum chat room cum e-mail service) systems and
watched with glee as the software cheerfully wiped pirate hard disks
around the world. Could you release disinformation? <g> Of course,
that could backfire, because then the pros will be pissed with you
and may want revenge.

Something like Acrobat, with a proper security add-on that prohibits
printing (even screendumps), might be a decent halfway measure if you
can set your e-mail gateway to filter out any outbound PDF files
(tough to do) and set your server to prevent downloads to local hard
disks, but that strikes me as kludgy and relatively easy to break.
Could you provide more details on how you route the drafts for
review? That might help a bit.
--Geoff Hart @8^{)}
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca

"Patience comes to those who wait."--Anon.

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