Re: Big Brother is watching?

[Andrew Plato <intrepid_es -at- yahoo -dot- com>]

Rowena Hart"  wrote.

> I recently changed jobs and was not terribly
> surprised to hear that my new employer actively
> screens all outgoing e-mail (including e-mail
> sent from my "private" Yahoo! account).

Technically, if its their Internet connection they can watch EVERYTHING
you
send out over it. Same with phone lines. Realistically, companies that
spend
this much energy on monitoring employees are either:

1. Horrible places to work because the management are all paranoid freaks
who think control is the only way to make people behave.

2. Great places to work because they have cutting edge technologies that
require a lot of security to protect them from industrial spies.

Since most companies out there do not have cutting edge technology, I
would
say such overt survaliance is merely a sign of a horrible place to work.

> At my previous job, our technical writing
> department manager used to regularly screen
> our e-mails for evidence of job dissatisfaction,
> job hunting, or slanders of her managerial
> talent. At least one member of the department
> was reprimanded by this manager for complaining
> about the manager in a supposedly private
> Yahoo! e-mail. Was this legitimate or was this
> an invasion of privacy?

This actually happened to me in college as well. I actually got fired for
this. Get this:

I wrote a letter to a friend at home. I asked my manager if I could use
the
office laser printer to print off some school papers and such. She said
"no
problem". So I printed a letters to a friend and a paper for an English
class.

A few weeks later I went on vacation for 2 weeks. We were having problems
with a server and I told the marketing people to never just "turn off" the
server. Those old IBM hard drives had a tendency to fry if you didn't park
them properly. But the marketing people were total dolts and never
listened
to a thing. Sure enough, they turned it off and fried the hard drive. They
called in a hard drive restoration company to get the data off it.

In the process they found a temporary file that Wordperfect 5.1 had
created.
It had the entire contents of my letter to my friend where I called the
division manager (who was a completely tyrant) a dirty name.

In retrospect, I wasn't fired because of the letter. It was an excuse. I
had built a very sophisticated wide area network to gather data from
numerous remote systems. The thing was very cool for 1980's era networking
and database technology.  Their sanctioned computer expert said would take
2 years and millions of dollars to implement this system...I did in 2
months for about $2000.  This cheesed off the expert in a serious way...so
it was either his way or the highway. I got the highway and they tore my
system down.

Academia...gotta love 'em. 

Andrew Plato 



__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Auctions - buy the things you want at great prices
http://auctions.yahoo.com/

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

*** Deva(tm) Tools for Dreamweaver and Deva(tm) Search ***
Build Contents, Indexes, and Search for Web Sites and Help Systems 
Available 4/30/01 at http://www.devahelp.com or info -at- devahelp -dot- com

Sponsored by DigiPub Solutions Corp, producers of PDF 2001 Conference East, 
June 4-6, Baltimore, MD. Now covering Acrobat 5. Early registration deadline 
April 27. http://www.pdfconference.com. 

---
You are currently subscribed to techwr-l as: archive -at- raycomm -dot- com
To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-techwr-l-obscured -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com
Send administrative questions to ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com -dot-  Visit 
http://www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/ for more resources and info.