Re: "he had downloaded documents to an external drive against company policy"
In the interests of security a company I worked for removed hard drives and USB access from everyone except a select few. Given the sort of work that some people did, this was a very good idea . The select few were all very senior managers and they soon got fed up of engineers wandering into their offices with floppies/USB sticks and 25 pages of requisite authorizations. Solution? They 'delegated' the authority to their secretaries. All the secs' machines got their hard drives and USB access back and the engineers just dumped the paperwork in the tray and got on with uploading/downloading.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
