Alabama IT Whistleblower Fired For Spyware

chalker writes "Vernon Blake, an IT sysadmin for the Alabama Department Of Transportation, wanted to get evidence that his boss spent the majority of his time playing solitaire on his computer. Since emails to higher up supervisors were ignored, he installed Win-Spy, which grabbed screenshots several times per day over a period of 7 months. 70% of the resulting screenshots showed an active game of solitaire, and another 20% showed his boss checking the stock market. When he reported this to superiors, he was fired, even though he had 21 years of service in the position. His boss got a reprimand to 'stop playing games'. He is appealing his termination in court since he claims it was part of his job description to 'confirm and document' computer misuse for ALDOT. His complete story is here."

Comments

Re:That's 90%

[fuctape]

According to the article:

10. An analysis of the screenshots yielded the following results:

• 293 (approx. 71%) of the screenshots documented active, on-going games of solitaire.
• 87 (approx. 21%) of the screenshots documented web site visits, email subscriptions, and other miscellaneous non-job related activities consisting mostly of personal financial and stock market research.
• 29 (approx. 7%) of the screenshots indicated some job related activities, mostly consisting of an "I concur" in an email response. However, solitaire was minimized (hidden) for quick retrieval on most of these screens.
• 1 % or less of the screenshots were inconclusive as far as the type of activity.
• No screenshots (0%) documented any job-related activities such as word processing, spreadsheets, databases, job related websites, electronic document management, right-of-way plans standards, etc.

Additionally,

5. A screen capture utility was used to automate this process. The utility behaves like a camera by capturing photographs of the computer screen. The utility did not target any specific activity or application usage by the user.

6. Screenshots were automatically recorded at times randomly selected by the screen capture utility. The installer of said utility had no control over the randomly selected times.

7. Periods of computer inactivity on the part of the user de-activated the utility until such time that user input was detected. This feature prevented generation of redundant screenshots at night, weekends, holidays, days off, etc.

8. Also, A minimum time interval of approximately 30 minutes transpired between screenshots to prevent a large volume of redundant images. The purpose of the utility was to take a representative sample of computer activity. The pattern of computer usage on the part of the user ultimately governed the interval between screenshots. When no activity was detected, screenshots were halted.

I really hope this guy gets vindicated in the end. He did his job, documented his case very well, and got screwed.

Re:That was appropriate

[lifebouy]

Any government computers I have ever heard of require you to give consent to be monitored BEFORE you are authorized to use them. It's usually part of the IT policy which must be signed as part of employee indoctrination. Under normal circumstances, I would agree with you, but not for a government position.

Re:No it wasn't

[Maestro4k]

• Playing Solitaire is not misuse. It's not the best use of time, but it is not misuse. He sent the emails to the higher-ups, they obviously weren't that interested. In other words, he must still have been getting his work done. (Or his job wasn't so consequential, but it's not a syadmin's job to trim the fat.)

Actually if you look at the excerts from ALDOT's computer usage policy he has up any non-work related usage of the computer is defined as misuse/abuse. So in this case it was in fact misuse.