A major part of this section on security consists of technical details.

ICT group

The ICT group (any organization over 20 employees has a department of this kind, albeit with a varying name) is a bunch of professionals with autistic character properties by definition. That is why they are so good at working with computers and so bad at communicating with you.

Members of the ICT group love to make clear to you that they have administrator rights and you do not.

If you know what you are doing, you should have administrator rights on your own computer.

Are you a computer professional?

Here are the tests: Do you know the difference between UDP and TCP? Do you know what IPv6 is? Do you know what an RPC is? If you know the answer to these three questions you should request being an administrator on your own computer (not on the network). The ICT people will discourage this by telling you they want to protect you from yourself. In many cases you’d rather be protected from them. Insist on getting administrative rights.

Encryption

Encryption is not useful for your daily email messages. There is a number of neat encryption methods, like PGP (Pretty Good Privacy). But these methods are only practical if the communication is between a very homogeneous group of people. Scientists communicate with a heterogeneous group, consisting of colleagues, students, managers, secretaries, editors, reporters and so on. Many of them are not willing, or not able, to incorporate an encryption method in their email communication.

Privacy

Realize that your employer and people mandated by your employer have the right to read your email. Moreover, on the internet nothing is anonymous. Web servers and email servers keep detailed log files, often for years. Nowadays storage capacities of hard disks, combined with sophisticated compression techniques, alleviate the necessity to delete log files or archive files.

Your network drive and even the hard drives of your office computer can also be inspected by your computer administrators.

Remaining anonymous

Being active on the internet and remaining anonymous is extremely difficult in western countries. The only safe way is through internet cafés. I do not encourage sending or receiving emails anonymously.