From Dave Farber’s Interesting People list:
I think there’s a propensity for employees to believe their company’s stuff is secret even when it’s manifestly obviously it isn’t and can’t be. About forty years ago, a friend and I walked into a Western Union office and asked for a copy of the Morse code. (A friend of my friend had sent him a message encoded in Morse code; it was their form of fun.) The clerk in the Western Union office responded it was company proprietary and he wouldn’t share it with us.