This is an interesting way to plug an "analog hole" in secure environments (or, more accurately, environments where information security is desired). It remind

This is an interesting way to plug an "analog hole" in secure environments (or, more accurately, environments where information security is desired). It reminds me of stories of financial institutions filling the USB ports on desktop computers with epoxy. Here's my question....It seems that the confidential information with the highest value is small and qualitative. "Company X is considering the purchase of Company Y." Obviously, the value of that information for insider trading is huge. But, if I've read that memo in the law firm's office, I don't need to make a photocopy to profit. Perhaps the next tier down is where such hole plugging makes sense: A customer list is valuable, but I couldn't remember 10K names and email addresses, so I'd have to make a copy (digital or analog). One headhunter at a local office of a national firm told me that their client/resume system was Citrix-hosed and had copy/paste disabled to make it harder for employees to harvest data before leaving. Of course, access was logged at the record-level as well. What about cases where a needle might be found in a haystack? Copy all 10TB of a law firm's documents, take them home, and look for deals which might happen in the future. In either the digital (thumbdrive) or analog (copymachine) cases, it seems easy to figure out retrospectively that a breech occurred -- Look, Bob copied 5K documents and then quit!. However, the horse is already out of the stable at that point. Perhaps the preventative nature of this copy machine technology is what makes it attractive? Restaurant POS systems have all sorts of rules in place to prevent employee fraud. One scheme involves a server's friend making a purchase and leaving a HUGE tip on a credit card. The server gets his paycheck, and then the friend disputes the charge. To prevent this, POS systems can be configured to require a manager's approval for a tip larger than X%. I wonder if similar schemes could be employed to force collusion in data theft. Let's say that any user could print 100 pages without manager (or even peer?) approval, but someone else would have to vouch for the legitimacy of the request after that point? I wonder what percentage of breeches that would prevent. The same could be done with accessing documents from a law firm's document management system -- You can see N documents not related to your own clients before somebody else has get involved.