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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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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".
> 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
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"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus