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Blow the Whistle, Lose Your Job?
ccnull writes "You're a systems admin. On a routine PC repair, you discover a trove of child porn on an employee's PC. You call the cops. The employee pleads guilty and goes to jail. Then what do you do? You get fired. InformationWeek has an interesting expose on whistleblowers who lost their jobs, they say, because they publicly embarassed the company. The company has another version of the story. No matter what the reality is, at the center of this is a good question: If you discover illegal goodies on a machine, what should you do about it?"
you are a whistle tester.
four-oh-four
But child porn... I'd tell for sure. Fire me if you will...
We've always been at war with Eurasia.
... I simply report them anonymously.
That way, the perpetrator gets punished, I am left out of the deliberations, and everyone's happy.
Just email the URL or IP address to the proper authorities (your boss, the police, etc.) from one of your anonymous email accounts and you're all set (use a proxy too).
For each child in a single picture, how many more are hurt by it propagating along the internet and encouraging more abuse?
I think that there should be a law to protect whistleblowers, and perhaps some form of federal insurance that the can draw from in the event that they are retaliated against.
Whistleblowing, wether it is calling the cops on pedophiles in the workplace, or terrorists in your apartment building, is a critical tool of law enforcement. Sadly, too many privacy nuts would rather shelter pedos for the sake of being able to post anonymous crap on message boards...
The pervert doesn't know you'll both get fired for reporting it.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
According to the employer's response, that's exactlty what happened in this case.
What happened after that, and why, is less clear.The problem with the other option - covering it up - could be that some children would continue to be abused.
Paul "Say no to feeping creaturism"
Did you read the article? They did contact their manager. The police were only contacted later. And honestly, do you really think they got fired for reporting child pornography? Doing so would imply that the manager condoned the professor's action in downloading child porn. Please, there are obviously other things going on here that have yet to be reported. Read the articles before you post...
That does seem to be what they did in this case, and the empolyer insists they were commended for their actions and fired for completely unrelated reasons.
The whole thing seems fishy to me, but that's why we have courts -- to allow both sides to present their positions, instead of jumping to a conclusion based on what Information Week has to say. It's a shame that a ludicrous sexual harssment claim has to be the vehicle for justice, though.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I've already noted several posts here that say words to the effect of "report it to the boss" and "its not your problem to call the law".
Unfortunately, that is not always such a simple decision.
In some states, and I'm sure many more will follow, it is the law that, should you find evidence of child abuse or child porn, YOU are guilty of a crime if YOU do not report it immediately to authorities.
You may be an agent of the company, but you are also subject to the laws of the state you are working in.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
A child of five could understand this! Fetch me a child of five.
Or maybe it's not that funny.
I work government network security for a living. Part of the ethics instilled in us (along with federal regulations governing the position) is the broad understanding that we are here to protect the security of the network. We are not the porn police or any other type of legal official.
We are legally bound NOT TO report anything even if discovered on a routine call, not our job. We are not legally authorized to invade your privacy. That is why they have policy with warrants. It is also a position I stand behind and advidly enforce on my more moral or do gooder juniors. Your users should trust you to do your job and FIX the computer / issue, not narc them out. Your job is NOT to enforce your morality or ideas of what the law is upon them.
If you want to be a narc join a legal body and put your computer skills to use helping them. If just want to narc on your coworker because they don't fit in your ideas of morality, I have no sympathy for you or anybody like you. Losing your job should be the least of your worries, you should be hung from a tree.
Everybody breaks the law including you. Do you really want to live in a society where the guy behind you on the freeway calls the police on you for doing 57 in a 55.
Mind your own business and do you job unless your job is to bust folk.
De Oppresso Liber
The Boss will either just fire the employee or call the cops herself. Regardless, you should call the cops too, especially in the case of child porn which is quite serious.
Ideally you should alert the boss first to prepare for the embarassment and have the spokesman prepare statements before the employee is carried away. Tell her, I intend to notify the cops, she wont be able to stop you then. If she tries to stop you, and you tell the cops, and get fired, youd have a lot against the boss too.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
What should you do about it? What until the owner shows up for it, then beat the shit out of him.
"Much work is lost, for the lack of a little more." -Edward H. Harriman
Some people have this attitude towards porn, but usually, it's because they haven't seen the right kind yet.
Just wait until you get married and you're down to one night every week. You'll go hunt down some dvds you and the wife can 'enjoy together'. Believe it or not, the right kind of porn makes women very excited.
Are we becoming good little nazis who spy on each other and use punishment and revenge as the first resort?
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
OK, change the situation. Say you're in the office, and an unstable co-worker who happens to be in favor with the next level of management takes exception to some action of yours and proceeds to beat the living shit out of you with a baseball bat.
Do you "Work within the system" and let management discipline him, or call the cops and have his ass thrown in jail?
If you say "call the cops" How is it different if you're not the victim?
If you don't, when did you lose your self-preservation instinct, and did it hurt?
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
Also it encorages those pervs inbetween who are potentially abusers themselves. Since they can get the porn, and since others find it desirable to share, then what is depicted must not be so bad.
So why not look at little suzy? It's just looking
Why not touch little suzy, it's not serious...and my net friends told me they would too...
Does that make things clearer for you?
I completely understand what you are saying about the "proper channels".
I worked at particularly large American semiconductor manufacturer for many years.
They have their own fire response team.
If there's a fire on the site, screw the city fire department -- you're supposed to call security.
The company says that the city fire department is unfamiliar with the chemicals and equipment that they're liable to encounter. On the other hand, they have been chastised by the city police department and fire department on more than one occassion because they unnecessarily risked human safety by trying to handle their problems themselves, allowing them to spiraled out of control.
In the end, the company was frequently unable to handle these situations.
Now, here is why I'm very, very skeptical of your suggestion...
Corporations are legal entities in the eyes of the law, sure, but they have no morals. They didn't "grow up"... they are chartered by suits, snapping into life in one afternoon. Unlike real people, their first and only priority in life is financial.
I don't know you. Our parents didn't know each other. I grew up and live in Texas and I have no idea where you live. Still, I'll bet that you and I would probably agree on the "right thing to do" in 99% of the moral delimmas that we encounter, even though everything in the equation is subjective.
That's amazing to me, but it's a testiment to how societies function to keep order.
And how about corporations? Who "raised" them and what are their motives?
The real purpose of a company's "proper channels" is to mitigate their legal liabilities, that's all.
Go find a corporate lawyer and ask. They'll set you straight on this.
An employee discovering illegal porn on a computer or illegal anything is in a tough position: report it to you employer and the problem will magically go away or report it to the proper authorities and get fired because you violated some legal agreement you signed with them (under duress) the year before.
Employees caught in this situation are not fools; they're just unfortunate bastards.
--Richard
I'm going to hold in my opinions about using net filtering software at all, and just say this. How the heck do you know he didn't ssh into his home computer and download it from there? Or go to an ftp site? Or download the thing using any method that doesn't use a browser, thus bypassing the net filter?
Not to mention the guy getting caught was a professor...I'm willing to bet he had admin rights to his computer, and could disable all sorts of net filtering software
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
So lets see, you find a coworker murdered in a storage closet. You go inform your manager at Waste Management, Inc. He pounces for the phone, and tells you to proceed to your next task, which happens to be on another floor. Oddly enough, the police didn't come by to question you about the body. You still let the company deal with it???
I find it incredible that anyone could think that its an employee's duty to withhold information on felony activity occuring at a workplace. Or perhaps you think one needs to be sympathetic to a company's concerns while child molestation is being committed? Its people like you that let clowns from Enron swindle investors.
And yes, its obviously the employee's duty to inform their manager first. Which is what they did. How likely is it that two employees previously with good work records BOTH lose their jobs because they simultaneously are performing substandard work?
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
The next day, Perry gave the PC to Gross to back up, fearing it might crash and lose valuable data.
In the process, according to the suit, Gross opened a folder titled "my music," within which was another folder, named "nime," then another, "nime2." It was here, Gross said in an interview, that he encountered the illicit content. "I didn't have to click on any files when I went into the folder," says Gross. "There were thumbnail images, so I was pretty much instantly exposed to that."
If Gross hadn't opened those folders, he wouldn't have come across the offensive images in the first place. But Perry and Gross say it wasn't unusual for them to check the content of folders when troubleshooting; a large file, for example, can be an indication that a virus is at work.
I don't buy this. Are they claiming that standard procedure for these folks, when looking for a virus, is not to boot with a known-good disk and run an up-to-date virus scanner, but rather to go through folders looking for large files which might "be an indication that a virus is at work"? If so, that's pretty crappy. Well, I have this huge file called PAGEFILE.SYS on my C:\ drive, I guess I have a virus (it's Windows' swap file, for those who use other OSes), right? Sigh.
I also don't buy the "they were looking in the folder for files to backup" argument, either. That's not the way you do it. You use Windows backup, or a 3rd party utility, or a disk-imaging program (like Ghost for windows or DiskCopy for Mac) or you drag everything to a server for later restoration, or you use an external firewire/USB drive. You don't poke around for files and copy them one by one. Apart from being horribly inefficient, that would also kill the client's directory structure. For example, within my documents folders, I have subfolders for different classes, and for things like correspondance, and receipts, and the like. If some tech support company had to back up my stuff, and had copied the files one by one, instead of copying the entire tree, I'd be real pissed off.
So I don't think that they quite came across the porn in the line of duty. I think they were looking around without any good reason. (Not that this makes child porn any less wrong, but it does cloud the issue of discovery and reporting)
There is, of course, the other issue, which is that by default, newer versions of Windows use thumbnail view, which is unfortunate. If the prof had been using regular list view, and the techs had double-clicked the files, they wouldn't stand a chance of defending themselves. This raises the issue of just what exactly is "invading someone's privacy"? Even filenames can say a lot about someone. For example, if you see someone's desktop, and they have a bunch of files named "naked_teens_1.jpg" through "naked_teens_50.jpg", what are you going to think about them? What if the files were named "12_year_old_naked.jpg"? Does that change things? Suppose you wrote an editorial to your newspaper about how much you though Al Qaeda sucked. You named this file "al_qaeda_letter.txt". You take your PC in for service, and some tech sees it, and decides to report you to the FBI. (Not too far-fetched in this day and age). Are filenames public or private information? Sure, you can't prevent people from seeing filenames, but do they have the right to act upon them? (This applies to other issues, like when the RIAA found files with the name "usher" and "mp3" and assumed they were songs when they actually were some prof's lectures.)
I work in tech support, and I find myself in lots of situations when I have access to users PCs. The general guideline where I work is to see as little as possible. For example, If I'm working on a PC, I try to stay at the root level as much as possible. When we need to backup a PC, we drag the entire directory tree to a USB drive (if its PC) or a FireWire drive (if it's a Mac), or a server if nei
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
If a tech guy, justified or not, should discover that sort of sh%t, he should alert management, and give them a chance to handle the case and do damage control as they see fit..
If managenment doesn't feel it needs to do anything, or the action doesn't match your moral standards, you don't wanna work there anyway - so go ahead and blow the whistle - anonymously or not.
Working for M$ is selling your soul?! No, working for an employer that doesn't report child porn in order to protect marketing interests is selling your soul!
So now you can lose you're job for reporting people with child pornography, but get a freaking medal for reporting people with mp3's of the work of musicians that get caught with child pornography?
I reported rampant software piracy to our CEO and board member and got fired within hours. This happened in January. Now I sense that I'm blacklisted.
Why shouldn't a computer support person have similar protection under the law, especially in this day and age, where so much of the porn is in digital form?
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
The problem with the other option - covering it up - could be that some children would continue to be abused.
How does having JPEGs on a computer equate to child abuse? I'm sure many of us have seen the pictures of the death camps with corpses stacked like cordwood, but that doesn't mean we go out and exterminate Jews. A couple of decades ago, there was a problem with so-called "snuff flicks" which showed the actual torture and murder of people (usually young women). I can't imagine anything worse than that, but people weren't put in jail for viewing those tapes.
This is like the laws against drug use. They really don't do anything except give warm fuzzies to the people who stand up and beat their breasts to show their concern. I don't use or advocate drug use or viewing child porn, but I don't want my tax dollars wasted on the pursuit and incarceration of perpetrators of victimless crimes.
If you discover illegal goodies on a machine, what should you do about it?
The policy at my employer is for us to tell our boss who then tells the VP HR.
In every case I know of the employee was fired and in one case where child porn was found the employee was arrested on the spot.
The right call at most companies is to punt the situation to HR and let them deal with it.
Happy Fun Ball is for external use only.
Well without seeing exactly what pictures these techs saw, one can't say for sure, but I think 99% of 'kiddie porn' accusations are nonsense. They don't involve, say, someone kidnapping 5 year olds and photographing their rape and torture. Now, if this professor was actually doing that, then I'd have no problem throwing the switch on him. But something tells me that's exceedingly unlikely.
Usually what's involved is someone that didn't produce the pictures, has no way to know their provenence and in no way contributed to their making, and the pictures in question are perhaps shots of 16 year old girls on nude beaches and the like. 16 years is the age of consent in a lot of countries you know. In the US it was formerly 12, in fact if memory serves 11 in one state. And there's no way to tell what age a model was in most cases anyway - is that a 16 year old, or an 18? Without knowing the provenence of the pictures and having records to prove the ages of those involved, it's simple conjecture, hiding behind outrage to avoid proving anything.
Frankly, in the absence of evidence of some real wrongdoing (kidnapping, torture, whatnot) I'm extremely skeptical of the notion of simply possessing digital image files being a crime. I'm extremely skeptical, also, of a tech that would make a stink because he saw some naughty pictures on a professors machine. Like I said, without having been there and knowing all the details, I'll have to withold judgement, but it sure sounds to me like a couple of people that have proven themselves untrustworthy by their actions, caused a basically innocent man a hell of a lot of trouble, and deserve a lot worse than they're getting.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
They reported it to their supervisor. Then the company has the ability to handle it how they like.
I don't see why anyone should get in trouble for reporting an illegal activity going on at work to their supervisor. I could understand if the employees directly went to the police or media and not giving the company the ability to handle it.
Maybe I've had the experience of working at better companies. A coworker and I had the wonderful experience of walking into work late one night and all the lights were off and one of the employees was sitting at a computer... well you get the idea. I reported it to my boss and the employee was fired the next day. Their were logs that verified what was going on. Some things just aren't appropriate at work.
As a system administrator, I always make sure that their is a message drawn up by the legal department that we may discover things in the normal duties of our job. I have never poked around people's stuff. But I have had to go into people's home directories to fix things for them (my general policy is I don't touch your home directory unless you ask me to). However, I do go through system logs occasionally. If something turns up in system logs that shouldn't be there, I will report it to my boss.
One company I worked for had a policy that we were to ignore any porn found. That was fine with me, it's their decision. This was done after management decided to crack down on it, and it was found that the largest downloaders of porn were some of the vice presidents. After those results, the policy was quickly put in place.
This message is encrypted with Quad ROT-13 to protect the author's copyright under the DMCA.
this isn't just pr0n, but child porn. big difference. let's say you found emails, etc., that the guy was running a drug ring, selling crank to kids down at the local school yard. or that he was funneling money to al qaida or something. where do yo draw the line. maybe i'm biased. i have two children and i teach seventh grade (12-13 yr olds). child porn is a pernicious offense and offenders should be pubished. you think he jsut say, gee thanks, i won't do that any more. look at the research on child molestors. they are habitual. they cannot be "cured". actually true of most sex offenders. but towards children especially.
i'm not talking about some 17 year old tittie, or some 18 year old drerssed in a school uni. hell, if i'd found the stuff on his computer, i'd probably just take the guy out back and beat him fucking senseless.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Just do your job, ignore the kiddie porn, and get on with your life.
Ignore the kiddie porn? Ignore clear evidence of a felony?
What if you recognized one of the children in the photos? What if you (accidentally or otherwise) ran across a photograph of your neighbor's child, your niece or nephew, your son or daughter, being sexually abused? Would you just ignore it and get on with your life? If not, why would it make any difference if the children in the photographs are strangers?
Ok, maybe you don't think child pornography should be a crime. What if you ran across photographs that provided evidence of bank robberies? Murder? Rape?
!!!NUKE ALL ARABS GO AMERICA!!!
Oh, I see. You're an idiot.
the article says: "For two hours, Perry tried to fix it, uninstalling and reinstalling antivirus software, but the system continued to malfunction. The next day, Perry gave the PC to Gross to back up, fearing it might crash and lose valuable data."
Any technician that "fix things" repeatedly installing and uninstalling the same software doesn't deserve the job... but that's my opinion...
We can't really judge the competence of the IT guys from how the news article describes their actions. Even if this is InfoWeek, you still can't assume that the reporter is technically competent enough to accurately sum up the actions described to him by the people he interviewed in this case. Reporters misquote and describe poorly all the time (I've been quoted in a newspaper 3 or 4 times and I think once were my words accurately transcribed).
And to report the problem to police is wrong, there is an hierarchy in the company, if they thought that the company wasn't acting accordingly to the case, the should anonymously fill a complain with authorities...
I keep seeing people saying "These people should have gone through the proper channels." This argument doesn't fly on two counts:
1) They did in fact go to their supervisor first. Their supervisor took it up the chain and police action resulted. Once police action resulted, it became a criminal matter and anyone with actual knowledge of the crime is perfectly entitled to take what they know to the police.
2) There are two hierarchies at work here, not just one, and they operate in parallel, not serially. One is your office's corporate hierarchy, which deals with matters relating to the operation of the business. The other is the legal hierarchy, which deals with matters relating to the legality of various actions. In this case, both came into play -- but the corporate hierarchy can't trump the legal one, or preempt it.
If you want another reason why it's not only justified but required to go to the law or otherwise make sure law enforcement is informed of a felony in progress in the workplace: Your office policies are a matter of contract law between you and your employer, and contracts are not allowed to force one party to commit a crime, or become an accessory to a crime. So if a crime is being committed in the workplace, you are required to report it to the legal authorities (or see that it's reported) if you know about it, and you may be required to report it to your boss.
None of the above should be taken as saying the company wasn't in the right in firing them, but the workers are justified and required to go to the law with what they knew, even if they knew it as a result of violating corporate policy (in which case the company is justified in firing them for said violations). The company doesn't get veto rights of any kind over the reporting of a crime in the workplace.
To make an analogy, if you broke into an employee's office to play a prank, and found a rape in progress, would you call the cops, or would you call your boss (assuming your boss isn't the rapist)? At that point it ceases to matter why you were there, for purposes of who to report the crime to, but it may matter in that you might lose your job over it (which is, really, as it should be).
-- Old Man Kensey
Ok, fair enough. If the kids in the kiddie porn were his own kids, or there was some other evidence that he had taken the pictures himself (they were taken in his house, for instance), then I would agree that one should get the police involved immediately. But if he just downloaded some stuff off the net, I think the correct response is just tell him to delete it from the office computer and do his jerking off at home!
Really, do we have to make a federal case out of everything?
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
No HR is NOT the proper channel, a FELONY was commited, the only proper channel is the police. Why is that so hard for people to understand. If a murder occours in the lobby do you call HR? No, you call the police. HR is for minor squables or at the most sexual harasment claims, not for serious felonies.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Contraband MP3s/movies are one thing - child pornography is something completely different.
Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic
What if it is the boss's computer?
Go to HR. Talk to them about what you found. Give them a heads up and that you may have to involve law enforcement, but want to give the company time to put together a coordinated response.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I think the correct response is just tell him to delete it from the office computer and do his jerking off at home!
Except then he continues to be a consumer of child pornography, thus he continues to pay for it, and someone else (an even bigger sicko) continues to get paid to exploit children in disgusting ways.
my pet machine
Then again, there are illegal things (like mp3's) and illegal things (like child porn) and they are not created equal.
Well, yes and no. I do expert witness testimony in criminal defense cases, many involving accusations of child pornography. The reality is that the feds view kiddie porn as an effortless conviction machine. Here's how it works:
If you have ANY porn on your hard disk whatsoever, they print it all up poster size and show it to a jury. After about the 450th pic of a thirty year old in pig tails, cheerleading outfit, or with shaven nether regions, technicalities such as legal age disappear from the minds of most jurors. It's easy to say to yourself, oh, kiddie porn - fry the bastard. It is quite another to consider the ramifications of having every image ever stored on any part of your system's hard drive (including deleted files, file slack, ram buffer slack, swapfile contents, etc.) and shown to 12 church ladies. And that's if the case even goes to trial. Most defense firms have no idea how to challenge electronic evidence, and often simpily do a plea bargain. In the cases I've dealt with, I have yet to see one instance of actual, real child pornography. Furthermore, of the computers I've worked on which were ever used to view pornography of any kind on the Internet, I've found enough of what passes for "evidence" these days to put the owner in prison.
Simple rules: if you like your money, don't download mp3s. If you like your freedom, don't surf porn. And don't participate in the 3 minutes hate. You may not know how finely the line is drawn beteween yourself and "those evil bastards".
My favorite part of the article:
But as criminally disturbing and emotional as this issue may be, the pending litigation has nothing to do with the professor. Employment of the technicians ended due to issues completely unrelated to this isolated incident, which will become clear as the case progresses through the legal system. Claims made by the plaintiffs cannot be taken at face value and should not be trumpeted as fact via media when they are based solely on unsubstantiated allegations.
Translation: Yeah, we fired them for that, but we didn't think they'd sue us. We'll just say we have evidence that will appear in court. We'll pull a tardy report from a few months ago, bam, permission to fire them. Never mind that the guy they told on was a golf buddy of mine and asked me to get rid of them as revenge.
Do corps do this kind of thing? You'd better believe it. I used to work for a utility as the network admin. They would come to me and ask for me to find "evidence" for them to fire someone. Usually all that took was a weblog or a copy of an email of them doing something against company policy. I hated doing it, but it would have been my job if I said no. The reason they tell you you are fired is never the real reason.
The company's article says that there are other things going on, which they can't talk about because there's a lawsuit pending. If that's not true, and they're really doing it because they're embarassed about it being reported to the police, then they should presumably have also fired the supervisor who reported it. Sounds like there are multiple sets of ugliness and stupidity going on here...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Of course, I could do such browsing at home. But many things don't make sense to always do at home. If I need to schedule a meeting with a doctor, I'd have to call during the doctor's office hours, which are also my work hours. If I emailed information to my doctor rather than calling him up and telling him, why does this information suddenly become less priviledged?
Your company does not own you. Even if you don't use a computer at work, you still have some expectation of privacy. The company cannot go rifling through your wallet or purse, yet much of the stuff on the computer is even more personal than this.
Really, is it that hard to imagine situations where it would be valid to use the computer at work for personal reasons? What if I suffer from panic attacks, and need to schedule an appointment during office hours (again). I obviously don't want to say over the phone at work, "Yeah, I need to schedule an appointment with the psychiatrist." Doing something like having my partner arrange the appointment, and email me the time to show up, is a much better solution.
I could get around this too, but really, the bottom line is that no company owns my sole, even for eight hours a day. When we enter work we do not become property of the company. What could possibly be your justification for thinking otherwise? That someone said, "Anything that happens at work is the business of the company."? Does someone saying it make it true?
Or you might be convinced by the law. But just because companies have successfully lobbied for laws granting sweeping rights into invading our privacy by no means makes it correct. There are many instances throughout history where laws are incorrect, even in our own country. So it has to be something else. So what is it?
Finally, here's a little exercise for you. Tell me who you are. Tell me where you live. Tell me when you masturbate, and how often. Tell me what the stupidest thing you ever said was. Tell me your grades on every assignment you've taken. Tell me your personal medical history, including all the embarrassing ailments you've ever had. Tell me about all the "black sheep" in your family, such as the uncle who cheated on his wife, or worse, someone arrested for doing something stupid.
If you feel in any way hesitant to comply with any of these requests, then you have a sense of privacy. If you feel that the company you work for would be stepping over the line by asking for any of this information, then you believe that we have a right to keep information from companies we work for. And as society demands that we work more and more to maintain sustenance, and as communication tools put us in touch at any moment and any place, you have a fundamental contradiction in your beliefs. Unless, of course, you deny that we should work at any job with these communication tools present.
If you've stumbled across evidence of substantial and systematic bilking, theft, fraud, etc. in a corporate database on an utterly massive scale... remember, fish rots from the head down. Going up your chain of command is what you have to do, but do expect severe and immediate retaliation.
Just them knowing that you know what they've been up to, by your routine data QA, is enough to cause sudden complaints about your "behaviour." Remember, it takes two to tango, but only one to squirm . Their complaints are evidence that they're starting to squirm. You need a plan now.
When the going gets tough, the tough take notes . Keep copies of things. You you are going to need a well-planned and pre-established "exit strategy", because you will be punished for doing the right thing.
While "Retaliation for Opposition to An Unlawful Practice" is illegal, it will take you 3-5 years to prosecute your retaliation case, while also giving testimony in the civil and criminal cases the FBI or Serious Fraud Office is going to be bringing against them. You are going to need one heck of a safety net.
So your order of business is:
- Detect Evidence
- Discuss with Spouse, Family, Religious Leaders
- Document Evidence
- Find out whose the best lawyer in the
State, if not the Land for handling your case
- Copy Evidence,place under lock and key
- Find another job, sell excess assets, cash in annuities
- Report Evidence up Chain of Command
- Enjoy Watching them Squirm!
- Resign at the worst possible time for them
- Provide Your Evidence to The Authorities
- Going to the Press is a last resort
You have to discuss this with your spouse and grown children as soon as you even have suspicions, so that you can plan your exit strategy together. They have to understand that you all might be a lot happier in the Peace Corps or setting up wireless networks in Africa, or living on a high-school teachers' salary or grad student stipend. If you belong to a church, mosque or synagogue, discuss it with your pastor, priest, imam, rabbi-- because, God help you, you will need serious moral support when the poo hits the ventillation system.When you must report criminal wrongdoing expect to get canned--for "other reasons" of course. You will be surprised at how lame a case they'll be willing to make for those "other reasons." So will the judge.
Child pornography is criminal wrongdoing. Bilking legitimate shareholders of millions of dollars a month is criminal wrongdoing. A utility defrauding half a nation to the point that its factories are closing, its schools are cold and dark, and its hospitals have to turn away sick children is criminal wrongdoing.
> viewing the material just encourages it.
In what way does some anonymous pervert in New York downloading images that someone probably posted months or years previous from someplace hundreds or thousands of miles away constitute encouraging anything? Be serious for a second and think rationally about how these images are produced and get disseminated.
As a writer I've researched the matter, and the fact is that 99% or more of what most people would consider "child pornography" to be (hardcore sexual images of pre-adolescent or early adolescent minors) comes from two sources. Once-legal magazines and videos that were published in the 1970's before any child pornography laws existed, and which were later scanned or captured to digital format, are one source. Child molesters who film their abuse and pass it on to "friends" online are the other.
Now, with regard to the former, no one possessing such images can truly be said to have been encouraging anything--the abuse occurred 20 or 30 years previously, when the abusing was just as illegal as it is today yet the filming and distribution were not explicitly illegal yet. It is *exactly* the same situation as viewing concentration-camp footage--no one doing so is encouraging or discouraging anything. It's simply a heinous relic of the past. No one makes money off it anymore--it's no longer a commercial industry and hasn't been for 20 years and more.
Regarding the latter, yes, if you are one of the "friends" to whom the child molestor sent his imagery, then you can truly be said to be encouraging the abuse. However, most people who view child pornography view it as distant links in a tenuous chain, after it has been e-mailed between countless people and posted to websites and posted on USENET hundreds or thousands of times. This becomes a very gray area both ethically and morally, even though the law makes no distinction. Posting the material, passing it on along the tenuous chain, could reasonably be argued to be a subtle form of encouragement of what is depicted. That's an argument that makes some sense, though is still ambiguous. However, what if the college professor in this case merely downloaded the images for his own private viewing and never passed them on to anyone, never posted them anywhere, never became another link in the chain because the images stopped at his hard drive and weren't further disseminated by him?
Well, then the idea that he encouraged anything at all through his possession, but not dissemination, of the imagery, becomes far from convincing. In fact, I'd say the argument fails entirely--facelessly copying a digital file off a public forum like the Net isn't unethical *or* immoral on its face. Yet, it is still illegal, although one can clearly say it *might* be unjustly so.
There is no commercial industry in such material being "fed" by the consumer. That's a common misconception. The child molestor does what he does for the sex and power, and shares the material with people he deems as like-minded. Those people can be thought of as supporting him and the abuse, but somewhere along the line the imagery leaves the purview of him and his "friends" and just floats through the electronic ether for strangers to find.
However, what most people would consider child pornography is not the same as what is actually considered child pornography in the U.S. It's a much broader category, which includes nude images as well as hardcore videos of 16 and 17 year olds which were produced legally in parts of Europe until recently. In places where the age of consent was 16 and child pornography laws stated that child pornography constituted imagery of people below that age, adult material featuring 16 and 17 year olds was once as common and legal as adult material featuring 18 and 19 year olds is in the U.S.--and yet U.S. law makes no disctinction between this material and something produced by a child molestor raping a young girl or boy. One has to seriously question the rationale there, since
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus
That is not quite true, at least for Colorado. (All of the following comment relates to the law in Colorado)
s e/ 2650a/27c36/281dd?f=templates&fn=document-frame.ht m
T ITLE 18 > PART I > CHAPTER 110 > Sec. 2256.
from
http://198.187.128.12/colorado/lpext.dll/Infoba
18-3-402. Sexual assault.
(d) At the time of the commission of the act, the victim is less than fifteen years of age and the actor is at least four years older than the victim and is not the spouse of the victim; or
(e) At the time of the commission of the act, the victim is at least fifteen years of age but less than seventeen years of age and the actor is at least ten years older than the victim and is not the spouse of the victim; or
from the US criminal code, http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/2256.html
(8)
''child pornography'' means any visual depiction, including any photograph, film, video, picture, or computer or computer-generated image or picture, whether made or produced by electronic, mechanical, or other means, of sexually explicit conduct, where -
(A)
the production of such visual depiction involves the use of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct;
(B)
such visual depiction is, or appears to be, of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct;
(C)
such visual depiction has been created, adapted, or modified to appear that an identifiable minor is engaging in sexually explicit conduct; or
(D)
such visual depiction is advertised, promoted, presented, described, or distributed in such a manner that conveys the impression that the material is or contains a visual depiction of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct; and
**End of law quoting
Note that it would be COMPLETELY legal for 2 14 year olds to have sex. However, I do think that if another 14 year old was to photograph this, then that would be child porn, even though the act itself is completely legal. This is incredible to me, that an act can be legal, and a recording of that act, with the conscent of all to be featured in that recording is illegal!
Also, these laws do not take into acount the age of the person who posses the child pornography. What if a person who is 17 has pictures of other 17 year olds having sex with other 17 year olds? It would be legal for all of those people to have sex, but it is a FELONY for some of the latter to make a picture, and give it to the first person? That is really incredible.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me