Does Your Company Censor the Content for You?

JAZ asks: "A few days ago a friend of mine and I were discussing this story. He was trying to make a joke about some content in the article that might be considered 'inappropriate' (the bit concerning 22,000 files). I didn't get his joke because the interesting bits weren't there. With a little investigation, I determined that my company's proxy server was delivering a modified version. Is this a common practice? Has anyone else noticed something similar?"

"In this case, words were not just filtered out, but the text had been changed so that the document still made sense. I suspect that someone monitoring a log and suddenly saw a document show up a bunch of times with the offending text in it. Then they modified the cached copy (I was viewing it a day after it hit the Slashdot front page) to make the alarm go away.

I have mix feelings about this, on one hand, even though the text in this case was meant as a joke and the content wasn't very offensive, I was using company equipment. But on the other hand, this company is a government regulated entity which isn't above pressuring its employees to vote the way management thinks is best (whether it is or not is a question for history). So I guess I'm scared that the company could push an agenda though 'stealth channels'. I realize that the information I read online can't always be trusted, but there are many people who don't know that. It's probably important to note that, while there is a policy of acceptable computer use, there has never been a notice that they might change the content we see online.

What are the feelings and/or experience of the Slashdot crowd on this?"

Comments

I am sick of it

[Pan T. Hose]

"I have mix feelings about this, on one hand, even though the text in this case was meant as a joke and the content wasn't very offensive,[sic] I was using company equipment. But on the other hand, this company is a government regulated entity" [emphasis added]

As someone responsible for network administration in a "government regulated entity" (quote and quote) I am just sick of employees caught on watching pornography saying "Oh, come on! It wasn't that offensive! Someone just sent me a joke and I absolutely had to see it in my work time!" I'm sorry but I cannot tolerate it. Two years ago we were sued by a woman employee who saw pornography on the screen of one of our workers and she won. We will not make this mistake again. Actually I was the one who opted for not only filtering, but also modifying the content of packets travelling through our routers. I used snort(8) and ngrep(8) together with netsed(1) and a custom libcap app to change pornographic pictures into our special picture (it changes the img html tags src attribute) with text saying usually something like "We are watching you! We have 328 resumes of people willing to take your place, you sick pervert! One more time and you're out!" and I have to admit, it works like a charm. We had to fire few sick bastards to show that we're serious, but those new kids are working much harder than them, so it was actually good to our organization. How do I say a picture is pornographic you might ask? Simple. If it's not on images.google.com with strict filtering on. Of course people are still willing to cheat using "covert channels" but we made it clear that those are in violation of our internal policy and we can sue them for it. It's much better to work here now, but of course I still have to monitor all of the traffic. You wouldn't belive how innovative those sick perverts can be. Unfortunately we cannot fire all of them.