Email monitoring in the workplace

OK, well I got this boring assignment about ethics in IT - you know the stuff - all very exciting...not. Anyways, it kinda got me thinking. Our topic is about whether or not it is right to monitor employee emails to see whether they are using it for work-purposes or if they are using it for personal reasons.

You may think that this is very similar to that CARNIVORE thread that was floating around, and still is, but it isn't. I was totally for that carnivore program, but this is completely different. It may be 'monitoring email', but think about it - one is to see if you are basically a terrorist and the other is simply to see whether you are doing your job.

Now that this is all clear, I will point out my opinion. I believe that it is simply wrong! Monitoring employee's emails will not benefit anyone in the long run. Firstly, they are trying to see if workers are 'wasting time' using email for non-work related purposes. Isn't monitoring of these emails 'wasting time' too?? Who is going to monitor the emails? The boss? Surely he has enough on his plate.

Secondly, it makes workplace environment feel threatening to the employee. If you know that the company you are working for is monitoring your email, everytime you send one you will be thinking about this and wondering 'should I send this'? It creates a burdon on the employee and reduces job satisfaction, thus, affecting proctuctivity in a negative way.

Also, say you want to simply send a message that says,

'Pete, I asked Jenny and she said she'll be right for Saturday - it's on, the Dolphin's will slaughter the King's - you got no hope of winning!! See ya then'.

Surely this message will have taken less then 2 minutes to write. What is wrong with that? The employee will be thinking, 'can I send this?' and will have all these worries which really do not need to be there. If they send it, they will be satisfied and get on with their job feeling better, as they have communicated with their friend and not worrying about 'how am I going to tell him?'

If I were a manager/boss at a company, I would simply expect my employees to do their job. If the job gets done, what does it matter if they sent 10 personal emails during the day. What if John got the job done and sent 10 personal emails. Sally isn't performing well, but she doesn't send email. What will the purpose of email scanning echieve in this situation?? The more personal emails you send, the better the job you do will be??

Again, I believe email monitoring in the workplace is totally useless and should not be the measure of 'how well an employee works'. It is a great distraction to the employee and a waste of time for the boss.

Please post your opinions up, I would like to know how you all feel about this topic. If you get negative antipoints for simply stating what you believe, forget about it - I know how you feel, I get em sometimes too. The people who dish them out have to seriously take a look at themselves cos they have very little brain matter.

Greg

Company point of view. Your on their network, your working on their time, yes it's a breach of privacy but your not in your home. Industrial espionage is something that could cost a company tons of money. Now monitering emails from a persons home is wack and I think that is wrong. Such "variable seaking" programs like echilon and carnivore are worthless and just seek to soak up tax payer dollars on a senseless witch hunt.

one reason for restictions of personal use of email at work...

w ww.myparty.yahoo.com

my point being users often don't think about the risks of email...no matter how many times i beat them...and personal email is inherently more risky than business mail...a lot more of look at "my pics and such garbage...far more open to social engineering...for the most part ...i couldn't care less what my users are writing...but if it puts my network at risk...then that's a whole other matter...

More often than not companies don't bother because of the simple fact that they send allot of email and it would take an entire staff of people to sit down and sift through. Not to mention that it would not stop the secrets/info from leaving, you'd just find out who sent them out.

Every company knows that it's employees use some of the systems for personal use. There is no way for you stop it in every fashion.

How about another poll?

An IT manager/Systems admin's perspective,

I happen to be the sole support for two companies, one with around 30 clients, and the other over 70. I sleep two hours a night if I'm lucky. And yes, I have monitoring set up over both Email and internet transactions. Both companies policies firmly state this, and most employees are fine with this fact.

I dont beleive in being a "Nazi" in the effect that if billy sends an e-mail to sara about going out for a beer after work we're going to write them up. I am harsh about junk email (which usually ends up blackholed before even reaching the recipient) nasty little attachments like .pif... and the use of email to send someone large non related files such as mp3's.

I dont have time to run around and deal with everybody's problems because billy bob wasnt smart enough to delete that email about the pictures from my party. I definately dont have the time to cruise through someones mailbox looking for "interesting" things either. It's not a violation of privacy thing, most of the interaction is with a filter and not me, people are usually fine with this. Once in a while we get someone who, for some reason cant stand the thought that the company has acess to everything on it's network... usually theyre the ones surfing porn while customers wait patiently for service. It's not a control thing, it's a security thing. I like to know whats connecting to port 8000, and I like to use company bandwidth for the company, not bob's Mp3 downloads. Broadband, Cable, DSL are all quite available here and the majority of my users have normal schedules which allows them plenty of time to do what they want at home. (although I do turn off the restrictions after hours for people, monitoring stays tho..)

Just my perspective
~THEJRC~

Hmmm...thanks for all your feedback with your opinions. Really got me thinking... I'm slightly seeing the benefits of monitoring email, although I still believe employees should be able to send personal emails and not have to worry about whether they will get into trouble. Yes, if they tend to keep sending large MP3's or viewing porn, this should be dealt with, but if they send 20 emails to their partner or friends and are still doing a good job for the company - the manager should not punish this at all, as they are still doing their job and aren't putting much strain on the company's network at all.

Greg

I think the point is that without monitoring you can't know what your employees are doing...they could be sending the "let's meet after work kind of email.." which i don;t think that any admin is going to really care about...as thejrc mentioned...we don't have time for that...

but.... they could be sending mp3s...which are likely illegal...(whatever your opinions on napsterizing..they are currently illegal under the law...in most places)...porn..which may or may not be illegal...these kinds of things could in fact put your company...and you as I.T. in a position of possible prosecution...and of course this thing scales exponentially as the size of your user base grows...small companies probably don't really see this as an issue...larger ones...it becomes one...whether you like it or not..

Well privacy is important but then again what if you got evil employees?
At Apple computer Jobs told his employees that they spend millions to promote new products, an employee told a friend who happened to be a journalist. It didn't get published but Job's Next machine intercepted it (he could read all the e-mail) and allmost fired her.

Look at it like this........

You got a neighbors house.. are you going to get naked in front of them so they can see you only have one testicle and laugh at you?

Point: Keep your private **** at home. It's thier house, they can throw you out for doing **** they don't want you to do.

EOF

zigar and THEJRC said it all. Yeah it's a bummer to get your email filtered, but then, you are at work.

I think it all been said above but here are my 2 cents :)

As an employee using company equipment and company infrastructure the company has the right to review my email. I have an ISP which I use for personal email. It was mentioned above that network admins do not have time to review email this is I think generally this is true. At my old job emails where considered private unless a complaint was logged with HR (to the best of my knowledge this never happened). I now work for a power company we are regulated and emails are occasionally presented as evidence in regulatory hearings -here I am much more paranoid.

That's my $0.02

-D

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Just because your paranoid doesn't mean someone isn't out to get you

You may want to think about this. If a Company is all in favor of installing an E-Mail monitoring process, ask them if they are also in favor of 'tapping' every business phone in the Company. The simple old telephone can be abused in a similar fashion as e-mail (personal e-mails - personal phone calls, Sending 'secrets' via e-mail - telling those same 'secrets' to someone over the phone).
My point, most Companies hire people to be professional, let them be professional. If you start monitoring e-mail, what next? Do you put 'swipe key locks' on the bathrooms so you can see how much time is being wasted taking a leak?

:confused:

DjM

:rofl:

DjM you just described one of the more recent company's i did some recent free lance work for. email is monitored, all phones are taped, and EVERY door has a mag key card on it. the real odd thing is that this company extremely huge. i don't see how they keep up with everything though. i will refrain from naming this company, ("can you hear me now?")

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Originally posted by jparker[]
Look at it like this........
Point: Keep your private **** at home. It's thier house, they can throw you out for doing **** they don't want you to do.
EOF

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That's how I see it too, Mr Parker. When at work ALWAYS assume you're being monitored. Don't even give the social implication of email monitoring a second thought. Just assume your company IS monitoring your email and than no harm is done. You'd be rather foolish to send personal (or even company) information if you thought you were being monitored.

I obviously don't agree with Companies invading personal privacy but like previously stated- "It's their money and their network"......They make the rules.


I've said this 100 times on these threads-- ONLY THE PARANOID SURVIVE!

::: Laughin :::

dJm....
we also monitor the phones, but like I said, I dont have time to hang out and look at every number or listen to any phone calls, but yes phones are in fact monitored.

Why phones?? Well we need to track how many cold calls the sales staff are doing, how many incoming calls go to what department, and we have also had a slight issue with large unexplained long distance charges (turned out a staff member was calling his sister all day)

Doesnt sound like much, but the days of venture capital dumping millions into a company "for the hell of it" are over, if we're going to survive we need to keep costs down here and there.

sounds harsh??? How many people do you know that DONT have their own personal Cellular phone?

~THEJRC~

It's the companys network. I belive they have the right to control whats on it. People can send the pics of themselves in leather from home to buddies. All the firms that I service. They don't realy check for content. They just have me block attachments and allow only plain text emails. Of course most of them just have me to block ports for popular file sharing programs. Besides I always fix them a signon screen with the rules posted at login. As the old saying "When in Rome, do as the Romans do". The network belongs to them. At home it belongs to you. That simple.

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Originally posted by {P²P}Apocalypse
They just have me block attachments and allow only plain text emails.

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That's just common courtesy. Same on the NewsGroups. Everything has to be in plain text. NO HTML. When you think about it, it makes good sense.


As far as phone call monitoring though, come one, that's got to be breaking some law. Just because it's a private company does that somehow make it above the law? It seems that alot of these companies are more like cruel dictatorships than a democracy....

I myself do not agree with e-mail monitoring in the workplace because it's an invasion of ones privacy. Plus when you get your regular mail deliverd it does not come open because that is against the law so i think e-mail is the same thing exept over the internet. To me mail is mail no matter how you get it. I can understand that maybe watching the incoming amount of mail or going out to see if that person is doing there work or if there just e-mailing people all day and not getting anything done. Anyhow thats just my opinion. :)




ANTI-HACKERS

Let me preface this by saying that, at my company, we have a policy(reviewed and signed by employees), which states that we have the right to monitor email/web browsing, anything we want basically, at any time.

We very very very rarely use this.

However. Think on this. We do not have this policy because we think that employees are "wasting time" sending personal email. Or wasting time browsing ebay, or something(thouhg we did have one person who spent about 80 percent of their day buying or selling on ebay, man that was expensive for the company). We do not do this because we think we OWN the employee, or to find out about the employee's personal life.

We reserve the right to monitor email and web browsing for 2 reasons. If an employee sends mail from our domain, which is threatening, or offensive to the recipeint, or several other things, WE as a company are liable. That costs money, sometimes, lots of money. Also, if an employee spends 80 percent of his/her time browsing the web, that also costs money, lots of it. A person is not hired simply because they breathe, and deserve to be payed. A company hires someone to do a certain job. Usually this "job" requires some "effort" on the part of the employee, which I know is a great sacrifice for many people. Also, if an employee is browing sites with a sexual theme, or a racist theme, and another employee who happens to be sensitive to those topics sees that, the company is liable.
We do not give a **** at all, what an employee does with email or the internet, or anything, provide that they get their job done. However, so many people these days seem to think that they deserve to get payed simply because they breathe, and take offense anytime someone even hints that their "work" email may be monitored, when they cant even be bothered to give a days work for a days pay.

Bottom line is. If you have to send personal email. Get a "personal" email account. It isnt like they cost any money. Hell, yahoo and many other sites give them out for free.

When you are at work, being payed by your employer, using internet circuits and bandwidth payed for by the employer, there is no reason at all for you to be doing anything other than your job, unless your employer(as many do) "allows" you to use their bandwidth, email servers, and storage space for personal reasons. All of these things cost money. T-1 lines don't grow on trees, available for anyone to just pick up. Your company may have a use for all the bandwidth a full T-1 gives, and your browsing may interupt business.

So, bottom line is. You work for one reason, because working makes you money. Employers also are there for the same reason. To make money. They are not there to provide charity for the employees. If a company decides that no one is allowed to browse for personal reaons while being payed by the company, that is their right. If you are being payed for 8 hours of work, that means, 8 hours of work. Not 7 hours of work with an hour lunch break, or even 6.5 hours of work with lunch and browsing the web time.

If you need to browse the web, or send personal email, there is no right that you have to do it on company time, using company resources. If you have to send mail that is personal in nature, that you dont want anyone in your company to see. Dont send it from work. Even if your company does not monitor mail, there is a chance that you could type the address incorrectly, and have the mail bounce, and be delivered to your systme admin, who needs to look at the email to figure out why it bounced. So, the supposed secret of an employees same sex cross dressing siginificant other is no longer secret or private, simply because an admin "must" review bounced mail to ensure that there is not a configuration problem with their system.

heh, I am positive that I will get negative antipoints for this, but, I really have stopped caring. The idea that the way you waste your time while being payed by someone else is none of their business, is ridiculous.

If you hired someone to fix the roof on your house. And were paying them by the hour, and you discovered that while they were charging you 8 hours a day, while working six hours, and spending the other 2 hours in a cofee shop chatting with their friends, would you be willing to continue paying that?????????????

How is it anydifferent for your employer????????

/me puts on his fireproof suit!

flame on people.

IchNiSan

I´ll go with the middle line. The company don´t own me and they will never pay me enough for the different thing I´ve been working with. BUT, those people that can´t handle the freedom of unlimited access to the net and can download/send asorted files (mp3, mpeg and whatsnot) should get a slap on the wrist. But I should still be able to send a couple of private mails and maybe call home to ask what I should pick up at the store.
Yeah, they own their net and should have controll over it.

But hey, wait.. uhm.. that means that it is ok to have systems like Echelon monitoring everything. The traffic monitored runs trough systems that those governments own.
Damn, I´m contradicting myself, I despise Echelon and what it stands for but at the same time I think the companies should do it. :splat:

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Originally posted by hot_ice
Now that this is all clear, I will point out my opinion. I believe that it is simply wrong! Monitoring employee's emails will not benefit anyone in the long run. Firstly, they are trying to see if workers are 'wasting time' using email for non-work related purposes. Isn't monitoring of these emails 'wasting time' too?? Who is going to monitor the emails? The boss? Surely he has enough on his plate.

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In a sense, it could be both yes and no. If you are losing lots of productivity from five or six employees, then it may actually be worthwhile to pay someone to spend time monitoring emails. Keep also in mind that most of the monitoring could be done from shellscripts or something similar depending on the mail server. I suppose, as with every situation, that it really does depend on what level of monitoring is going on. If you're picking up every email that contains the word 'sex', then sure, I'm for it, because that sort of thing isn't completely normal, but if you're paying someone or using some software to monitor ALL email, then sure, it's the company's dime, they should be allowed to be thrifty. After all, you work to earn money and be productive, not to cavort or chat.

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Secondly, it makes workplace environment feel threatening to the employee. If you know that the company you are working for is monitoring your email, everytime you send one you will be thinking about this and wondering 'should I send this'? It creates a burdon on the employee and reduces job satisfaction, thus, affecting proctuctivity in a negative way.

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Lame argument. Someone who is paid to do a job should do the job IMO. They shouldn't be slouching off and doing nothing but emailing people.

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If I were a manager/boss at a company, I would simply expect my employees to do their job. If the job gets done, what does it matter if they sent 10 personal emails during the day. What if John got the job done and sent 10 personal emails. Sally isn't performing well, but she doesn't send email. What will the purpose of email scanning echieve in this situation?? The more personal emails you send, the better the job you do will be??

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By design, email monitoring isn't for people who send 10 personal emails per day, it's for people who send 30-40 personal emails per day, and do nothing other than email for a few hours. It's designed to catch people who *are* losing productivity and *aren't* doing their work because they're spending too much time emailing.

All in all, it's not up to you to decide. You're allowed to think it's wrong, but it's not your business, it's the person who runs/owns the company's business. If they want to 'waste money' in this fashion because they believe it will increase productivity, all the power to them. It is, after all, their organization to run.

As previously stated, the employee should understand that they are using company-owned equipment for their personal use, so it should be okay for the company to monitor email. Would I want someone sniffing through my email? No, but I understand that by using company-owned equipment then I'm submitting myself for that kind of monitoring. However, I'm the systems administrator where I work and while I could monitor every little piece of email that comes over our network, I don't. I have no time to read how so-and-so's date was this weekend, what Johnny is doing tonight, etc, etc.

My point is that while people may disagree with the practice, it should be allowed since the company owns the equipment. I think it was said best earlier when it was stated that while at work, one should act as if the email will be monitored.

It is not just monitoring staff wasting time.

I have heard that some comapnies quarantine specific attachments in emails for two reasons. Some attachments can contain trojans/viruses and be ignorantly opened by an employee. The second reason is to decrease the size of peoples mail files, hence, the company does not need to purchase more mail servers to store all of these attachments.

When you think about all of the **** that is thrown around the Internet these days, and when you think how much of an employees emails are actually "business related", it is not a bad thing to implement.

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Originally posted by SoggyBottom
It is not just monitoring staff wasting time.

I have heard that some comapnies quarantine specific attachments in emails for two reasons. Some attachments can contain trojans/viruses and be ignorantly opened by an employee. The second reason is to decrease the size of peoples mail files, hence, the company does not need to purchase more mail servers to store all of these attachments.

When you think about all of the **** that is thrown around the Internet these days, and when you think how much of an employees emails are actually "business related", it is not a bad thing to implement.

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I've implemented a setup whereby any emails containing attachments that have a .VBS, .COM, .SCR, .PIF, .BAT, and .EXE extension are immediately bounced with a message saying we're not accepting those attachment types. I still feel like I'm leaving the door wide open, because I've allowed .DOC and .XLS, but unfortunately management dictated both word and excel docs as being out of bounds.

but what about zipped files?
or pgp encrypted files?

either of those (the zip especially) can allow viri & trojans into the network

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Originally posted by jcdux
but what about zipped files?
or pgp encrypted files?

either of those (the zip especially) can allow viri & trojans into the network

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On our network. Attachments are blocked, so no .zip files can come through. As well plain text PGP emails are allowed for authentication. However PGP container files are disallowed by company policy. Most of the companies we outsource to or contract with have the same policies in effect.

There's a couple of key points that need to be made when talking about communications monitoring at the workplace:

- monitoring of phone calls can be done to make sure customers get the service they need. You don't want your customers to get yelled at by some cranky employee

- in most companies, they make you sign papers that allow the employer to monitor your use of their facilities. It's their money after all. At my current employer, I have to indicate whether each call I make is for business or personal. It's a pain, but it might remove the need to monitor as much. And some people just abuse the system. In my previous company, one guy in the department was running up phone bills as high as all 24 other people in the department because he was making an enormous amount of personal calls (bills of around $700 a month).

- you can't compare your work email to your private mail at home. In my company, all mail, unless it's marked as personal and sent to a special address gets opened. It's treated as official correspondance. Once, my bank card arrived on the official address ... it got to me after two months or so, having come down the official ladder.

I think that as long as you use your company's facilities, they have the right to monitor it. If I want to do anything private, I'll do it from home. Ok, I make the occasional private phone call, as you need to do some stuff during office hours, but otherwise, I know where to stop.

Whatever you do, whether it's phone calls, emails, web surfing (like I'm doing now reading AO :) ), it's in the company time, using their equipment. I don't think companies should go overboard, because allowing some freedom is necessary for a good working environment, but they also need to be able to catch the bad apples.

That's what it all comes down to. A few bad apples make trouble for the rest of us and we have to bear the consequences.

Anyway, just my 2 cents.

BrainStop

Well, thanks for all your input. I did my speech at uni on this topic - I had to argue against email monitoring and here is my part:

Email Monitoring – Arguments Against:

First of all, I’m going to talk to you about privacy. Even though employees work for their company and use their resources, this doesn’t mean that their privacy shouldn’t be respected. Email is a means of communication and should be treated in similar fashion to a phone or a face-to-face conversation. Just because a person is inside an office building, doesn’t mean that all personal communication to the outside world should be blocked off or monitored. Companies need to respect their employees’ privacy and make them feel comfortable.

Some employees may not be affected by the monitoring of their email; however, others who rely on email very heavily may be greatly impacted. If email monitoring is introduced, these employees may feel uncomfortable in their working environment. Having a comfortable and enjoyable work environment is a great way to ensure productivity is high. Creating an environment where staffs have strict rules to follow is surely reducing the status of an enjoyable working environment.

Wasting time is a great argument for implementing email monitoring in the workplace. This, however, if very questionable, as a simple text email could be written in less then 30 seconds. Employees cannot be expected to work non-stop from 9 to 5 with only a 30 minute lunch break in between. People are not machines. They need to have small breaks every now and then, even if it is a simple stretching exercise, which is strongly recommended when working with computers for long hours. What if one person has a smoke break for five minutes, while another, non-smoker, writes an email that takes 30 seconds? How can we compare this? By introducing email monitoring, are we saying it’s wasting time to send a 30 second email, but it’s alright to have a smoke break that takes 5 minutes? The time it takes to send an email is very little compared to the entire working day. To add to this, monitoring all employees email would be an even greater waste of time. If the company has a large number of employees, people might have to be hired for the monitoring of email, which just produces unnecessary expenses.

I’m sure employees would be more satisfied with their job if they felt respected and trusted by the company. If the company starts introducing all these new monitoring policies, employees start feeling pressured when doing their work, as their every move is being watched. This reduces job satisfaction, as employees are left without much freedom. A company should not feel that they need to monitor their staff in everything that they do. I understand that companies must evaluate each employee and determine if they are a valuable asset to them, but surely this can be done by judging their work and not by preventing personal communication via email.

Greg

EMail monitoring in the workplace is quite simple. Allow me to break it down:

- The network is owned by the organization one works for. It's their stuff, they can do what they want with it. It's perfectly legal....and ethics don't come in to play. It's business, not personal. Just the way it should be.
- When you're at work, you're selling your time to the company you work for. Therefore, for lack of a better term (trust me), they "own" you for that given period of time.
- 99% of all hardcore email monitoring is done at random...the rest is filters and such to weed out known viruses, etc. If a company really has someone sitting there reading all of the emails, then that's their own fault for being un-intelligent and wasting money.
- Security. Security is a huge reason this is done. It comes in many different forms...anywhere from filtering viruses and junk mail, to monitoring one person's email, as you may suspect them of corporate espionage. (yes, this happens more than you may think).

I'm a net admin...and I do NOT read people's email. There are waaaaay too many other things that I have to keep an eye on. If an executive or manager wants something/someone watched over, it's my professional duty/responsibility to do as asked.

All in all: I have no problem w/ email monitoring. Don't do your personal things at work. You're there to do a job, not to goof around.

Don't type anything into your computer at work that you don't want somebody to see, it's as simple as that.

That said, you don't need to be uneasy about it, because chances are nobody cares enough to watch your every step.

People who send out 10 personal e-mails a day are not an issue, hell people who send out 100 personal e-mails a day are not an issue. If they're not doing their job it's their supervisor's problem, not mine. I let file sharing go as long as it's not hogging resources, an mp3 or two a week is fine, 20 a day is not. Pornography isn't something I watch for as long as it's legal, if they're looking at child porn or something I will report this to their supervisor. What I look for is e-mail that is a security risk, either external(like forwarding a virus) or internal(like sending out company information).

My Gov't contractos two cents:

In our office there are a number of people who use computers to access porn, gamble online, get mp3 etc. Part of the problem is that we are a 24-7 agency, and so there is a lack of supervision after hours....

Now I am not the IT/Networking Guy, but I am his un-offical back up, and he keeps me updated as to what goes on with the City IT group. Currently there is some form of monitering of employee internet use, which I am both for and against...

Employees are not being told they are being watched...which I think would encourgae them to not look at porn and what not. My problem with this watching is that it could be used to embarrass the agency....which would be bad.

So one the whole I like the idea...but I am worried that it might be used for nefarious purposes...

Just thought I would toss my hat into this ring....

(PS Tech Questions.....I bring my own PowerBook G4 laptop and plug it into the network, but I don't have any DC installed software on my HD...so what about my internet access can they see? I am assuming everything I do, but I would be interested in some specifics)

From the initial post, I dont think that it is quite understood how "monitoring" is done.

Firstly, it is not someone going through logs/mail files etc.

In regards to surfing the net, a "naughty word" list is created. When someone goes to a web page with one of the listed naughty words in the URL, an email is sent to the user from the proxy listing all URLs visited which are considered against company policy. Personally, I dont think that this is against company policy.

In regards to emails, a similiar "naughty word" list is created, and if an email is sent with swear words, an email is sent to the employee explaining that they be breaching company policy. Again, no one is reading these peoples email other than the sender and recipient, so I dont see how it can be considered an invasion of ones privacy.

Such an ethical debate!!!

using linux to received mail (pop3) is greatly cool. howver, it happens that your mail can be read by the system adminitrator (root priveldges) in /var/spool/mail. monitoring mail (personal stuff) is still illegal as long as there is permission to the recepient. but still, my point here that linux system administrator loves to read your mail without noticing it. still they can do some editting to make your day miserable. i done that! ;)