You're already out there

This just in:

July 25, 2007 (Computerworld) -- Millions of documents, both government and private, containing sensitive and sometimes classified information are floating about freely on file sharing networks after being inadvertently exposed by individuals downloading P2P software on systems that held the data, members of a House committee were told yesterday.

Among the documents exposed: The Pentagon's entire secret backbone network infrastructure diagram, complete with IP addresses and password change scripts; contractor data on radio frequency manipulation to beat Improvised Explosive Devices (IED) in Iraq; physical terrorism threat assessments for three major U.S cities; information on five separate Department of Defense information security system audits.

I've been wondering for a while in whether Google Docs would be a good choice for the college's Content Management System. It's a wonderfully simple way to share docs, it's cross-platform, remotely accessible, and free, as in beer.

One of the objections I've heard while kicking this idea around is that it might be dangerous to have our documents "out there", in the Wild, Wild Web.

I'd actually argue the reverse -- anything on a employee's machine is already out there: in our P2P world, the web is us.

Google Docs (or something similar) actually has the advantage that it dissuades users from downloading materials to their hard drives, the major source of leaked materials. Combined with the right cache settings and some SSL action, it could be, I think, a far more secure environment than what we have now.

The one catch? We need the SSL; Google Docs seems not to have it. But perhaps it's coming?