Employee Monitoring: It's Not Paranoia—You Really Are Being Watched! - PC Magazine

Employee Monitoring: It's Not Paranoia—You Really Are Being Watched!

Courtesy of News and Analysis by PC Magazine.

My good friend Charles Cooper used to write endlessly about the stiffs and goings on in the High Tech business. Coop's Corner was a must read at PC Week and on CIS, the debates were great. Then Al Gore invented the Internet...

I mention Coop because for a while they took away his pen, and made him a "Big Kahuna," at ZD ($,$$$,$$$), then CNet bought ZD (x00,000,000). He is back now, in a bloggish way, but I don't think he wrote this article, but his influence on digging, his knowledge, stature plus respect of everyone makes these types of articles "normal" for ZD'rs even if Halsey Minor owns a piece of them via CNet.

For government employee's everywhere, this article is well telling. You should know that all of your email is backed up every day, sends and receives, and well, they hire folks to read em, and kind of weep! Ditto for the Fortune 5000 (no typo), and other companies, little and big (small big).

[Ed. note: most of the employees who should be paranoid delusional at this point, are drinking tonight or whatever, and also do that whenever ...].

I have of course known when and who invented keystroke loggers, and then the consequent spread of them via "Black Hat" trojans or worms, then purposefully by the "White Hats."

The legal fight against it was lost in the U.S.

In Canada, I would not be sure if the "Freedom of Expression" clause of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, if the employer in question is allowing reasonable personal use, would afford the government or any organization to "spy" on their employees, with respect to certain personal email. Of course "business" related e-mail is fair game. But personal, in Canada? The employer might lose in Court in my humble opinion (IMHO) but if its not the employer's "problem" disclosed, yet by procedure is "protected" initially as personal by the employer (a "Chinese Wall"), the shield of the Charter might not survive some "personal" email being read and turned in.

For Northworthy readers, consider yourself informed here, at least a bit.