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When Ethics and IT Collide
jcatcw writes "IT workers have access to confidential data, and they can see what other employees are doing on their computers or the networks. This can put a good worker in a bad predicament. Bryan, the IT director for the U.S. division of German company, discovered an employee using a company computer to view pornography of Asian women and of children. He reported it but the company ignored it. Subsequently the employee was promoted and moved to China to run a manufacturing plant. That was six years ago but Bryan still regrets not going to the FBI. Other IT workers admit using their admin passwords to snoop through company systems. In a Ponemon Institute poll of more than 16,000 U.S. IT practitioners, 62% said they had accessed another person's computer without permission, 50% read confidential or sensitive information without a legitimate reason, and 42% said they had knowingly violated their company's privacy, security or IT policies. But in the absence of a professional code of ethics, companies struggle to keep corporate policies up to date."
on Slashdot???
Actually, I'd like to see a slashdot poll on this subject.
The ACM has done at least one thing right:
http://www.acm.org/about/code-of-ethics
Sure, it could be considered unethical to invade one's "privacy" at work by abusing IT privileges, assuming it's done outside of company policy, but that's just the thing...it's only "privacy," not privacy. Why would you be doing anything personal on company time? The answer is, you shouldn't. Getting in trouble for it is an assumed risk.
1) Not reporting something illegal when discovered in the normal course of business, i.e. whistleblowing. Fear for job safety or simple moral cowardice?
2) Actively doing things that the employee knows are illegal/immoral/unethical. Come on - does a "profession" really need a code of ethics to tell its members not to seek information to which they are not entitled? Maybe they need to reevaluate calling themselves "professionals".
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Look at SCO!
Wakka Wakka Wakka!
What's the discussion to be had? "yes, IT workers are put in a situation where they must mind their ethics" "I agree!"???
You see the logs of some guy looking a kiddie porn and you report it to your HR department.
Where's the ethical dilemma?
If HR does nothing about it, you report it to the FBI.
Where's the ethical dilemma?
And ethical dilemma would be where there were two ethically valid choices with different consequences. If you have two kids and they're both drowning, which one do you save first?
It's simple.
All those secrets and all that confidentiality is contrary to ethics. It's an attempt to keep your enemy from making intelligent decisions so you can destroy his capacity to act effectually and take what is his.
The capitalist economic system, with all its little trappings, is about war. That's why Sun Tzus book is one of the top selling books for executives.
It's not ethical to make war on your neighbours. Thus, there are no ethical guidelines for it.
Eventually you become numb. The young call it selling out, the numb call it growing up.
If you want to be ethical, find a way to not participate, and encourage people to live the way you found. If you want to be in business, you better lose the thin skin.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
There is a professional organization, of which I happen to be a member, Called "LOPSA"- "League of Professional System Administrators".
The code of ethics is found here:
http://lopsa.org/CodeOfEthics
While my IT department does not require membership in this organization, these rules of ethics are *posted* and violations of those rules are a fireable offense!
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
It is a large temptation to sneak a peek at what people do on their machines. Mostly for chuckles later when you find out bob in accounting is into bondage. But is the risk of finding something that you may have to report to someone worth the chuckle? Most of the time it is not a big deal because this type of discovery is, fortunately, not a common occurance.
I have an ethics problem every time I get a paycheck for 40 hours of work when I actually worked 60.
Using company systems for your own needs? heck, the company is alreaady getting 40 grand worth of free overtime. Is that ethical?
Never mind legal, is is ETHICAL?
Yeah, like Lawyers have.
And Doctors, the same who diagnose bogus psychological diseases in children just so they get kickbacks from the drug companies.
Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. At least most of the IT people aren't DOING anything with the data they collect. Just being nosy.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
Since when does the IT department not have permission to snoop through someone's computers? They're company computers and we have remote viewing tools for a reason. Plus almost all companies have a policy that says that the computers are owned by the company and we can look at anything on them at any time. Even if someone's snooping for a bad reason, it's still a company computer so if they find something questionable or disallowed by company rules then hurray for them and if they find something personal or embarrassing it shouldn't have been on the company computer in the first place. We shouldn't have to sneak around and be all cautious like the network is a minefield of stuff we shouldn't look at when we have jobs to do!
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
I regularly dump employee backups to my workstation and read through their 'personal' stuff. It's absolutely hilarious. I can't count the times when employees who were fired or quit erased large parts of their hard drives not understanding that everything was archived. That's what got me started. What were they hiding? Some pretty funny shit, it turns out.
I think these numbers are bogus.
I know of people instantly fired for doing such things. There is an unwritten IT code and the vast majority of IT people I have known or ever come in contact with follow it.
If it was like the PMP, CMA, CPA or other professional certifications/licensure that industry requires for certain jobs, then code of ethics violations would mean loss of certifications/licensure. That would weed out all those unethical assholes in IT.
In God we trust, all others require data.
When I was sysadmin for a small company years ago, I discovered shortly after installing ProxyServer in our Exchange machine that the boss (or someone???) had been surfing porn on his machine. I was delicate, mentioning in a private moment that we (sysops) could see exactly what sites had been visited, on which machine, and who was logged in at the time. We never spoke of it again. I later left the company voluntarily, under no duress.
Probably a million stories similar to mine...
I would like to say that I -never- looked at anyone's data, all of the times I maintained accounts for people. But I did only once, when I suspected that someone had shared their password with a non-employee and that person was logging into the company (which turned out to be correct). So I guess I can justify my snooping by -their- breach of trust. But I still wish that I had not marred my perfect record, although nobody cares about it but me.
"62% said they had accessed another person's computer without permission, 50% read confidential or sensitive information without a legitimate reason"
I find it worrisome that such a large percentage of out IT workforce is so cavalier about ethics and privacy. I'll ignore the intentional violations of
security policy because much of they MIGHT be attributed to one-off circumventions in order to get a necessary job done. It is curious that so many would
find snooping such a permissible activity. A professional code of ethics isn't necessary here, these people simply have little ethics at all if they will
"snoop" through private or sensitive information simply because they can.
This just highlights yet another area where our society has lost its moral compass. This isn't merely a problem in IT, and there is no need for a "professional" code of ethics. This is something that all people should share. We shouldn't need a document spelling out "don't go snooping around you neighbour's things for no reason.
That said in reality it can be a tough decision with many variables to report criminal activity on a user's computer that you administer. Often your superiors will blame you and not the criminal. Two things I have found helpful in my own experience are knowing the politics around the company and talking to an IT savy lawyer. The lawyer can help determine what laws are broken, if any, and how the company computer use policy is writtten. Knowing the politics around the company can help you guess which way the grief is going to roll down hill, on the person misusing the computer, or on you. Study, plan and organize before you say anything.
As a shortcut, ask yourself, what would the BOFH do?
I never seen it.
Having dealt with the FBI in terms of investigations, they still call me. Not that I don't mind getting scum behind bars but that isn't my job nor will I get paid to 'help' the police do their job. No, I won't testify as I won't get paid. I was never asked to find the illegal activity nor was I ever charged with investigating.
So, if I see anything, I ignore it. 95% of the porn I have seen has been on computers owned and operated by LAWYERS.
Sociopaths love being in charge. Arguably, there are quite a few of them in the upper ranks of many organizations.
However, sociopaths do not like competition and the non-sociopaths below them will make quick work of dispensing with any pretenders to the throne. They may not agree with your strategies, but they've read your playbook.
So for the non-megalomaniac, it is probably advisable for success to not be a raging sociopath.
Violating company policies and snooping is one thing, but employees do not own their computers and staff administering machines do not need permission to access systems.
"Business ethics" is an oxymoron. You're either there to earn money and out-compete everyone else, or there to act ethically. The two don't mix. If you try, someone else will cut that ethics corner and out-compete you, and then the people who own your stock will sue you.
technical writing / development
If you have an ethics issue with your current job, you should quit, and find a new job. The last thing you should ever want is to be thought of as a person who will compromise his principles for money.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
It's a sad state of affairs, that like gossip, confidential information is always the most interesting. No ethics code is going to stop unscrupulous (AKA dishonest) people from snooping in other people's private affairs.
Mean what you say...say what you mean.
- morally wrong (going against your own personal conscience)
- legally wrong (going against codified law)or
- sinful (going against your religious beliefs)
Watching child pornography is illegal in all relevant legal systems, and not reporting someone to the authorities could be considered a crime of omission or obstruction of justice. It might be sinful, depending on your religion. It is probably considered morally wrong by the majority of people.The problem I see with the dilemma posed by the article is that he tries to conflate these areas and to get a mental map that divides things neatly into The Right Thing(TM) and The Wrong Thing(TM). I think this approach vastly over-simplifies things; take file-sharing, for instance: many instances are illegal since they break copyright law. Yet I wouldn't think it is immoral, since the laws appear to be unjustly slanted against consumers. I couldn't say how religions see the issue (the closest I could find was a quote from the Bible: "go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor" which seems to speak out against hoarding property), so I won't make a qualified judgement on that.
But it should be clear that this is a complex issue, and people trying to frame it in terms of "right" and "wrong" without specifying the framework they're using makes a good answer almost impossible.
-- Language is a virus from outer space.
There has to be somebody with the keys to the Kingdom....even if it's RBAC'd. And sometimes those powers are abused or misused.
/., people sometimes break laws?
What's the next topic for
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
Sure, I have unmitigated access to everything that comes, goes, or happens in my company. And if I don't have access to some particular facet of the boss's operation it's pretty trivial to give myself access. But do I snoop through other employees' email or documents or browsing records or whatever? No. But, admittedly, not because of any particular integrity or high moral standards on my part.
I just don't care. Yeah, it might be nice to intercept early the memo that says I'm going to get canned tomorrow (or whatever) but I have more than enough things on my plate and no time, motivation, or incentive to play Secret Squirrel with other people's stuff. I have news for you: 99.9999% of what happens on a business network is mind numbingly boring. Memos. Transmittals. Materials lists. Spreadsheets. Schedules. Business correspondence so packed with legalese and ass-kissing and meaningless paradigm shifting buzzword bullshit it makes my brain hurt just thinking about it.
If I want to abuse my authority and misappropriate company time and network access, it's easier and less mind-frazzling to just delegate the job to somebody else and go read Slashdot.
That's where you are incorrect. There was never any privacy when someone was using their "work" computer for "personal" use. If you think you have any privacy using a computer provided by your employer, using your employer's resources to access the porn, you are mistaken. Courts have held numerous times employers own the equipment and have the right to view (i.e., spy) on your usage.
There was no privacy here, therefore no ethical issue.
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IT work outside of the well-paid areas is a breeding ground for discontent. It's thankless, low-paid work where you have to deal with a lot of stupid people. Add on to that that people who go into IT who are ambitious, ethical and hard-working are probably going to be more attracted to the engineering side (software, hardware and network) than the grunt technician work and you have a big problem on your hands.
I have never met a person who works in IT support that I would trust with my personal PC. That's just my experience, but I have known guys who would abuse their access to people's PC to get all sorts of files they shouldn't, which is why I didn't hesitate to believe the Consumerist story about Geek Squad employees abusing their customers in that way.
You know what needs to be done? They ought to be treated like a repairman who is caught going off into a totally unrelated part of the house and rifling through personal belongings. It may not be stealing since they're just copying, but that's the closest thing that we can compare it to.
> But in the absence of a professional code of ethics, companies struggle to keep corporate policies up to date."
How hard is that? Every large company I've seen policies for has blanket statements saying something like "don't access stuff you're not authorized to access".
What is not being kept up to date? How much more complicated does it need to get?
Some companies don't feel the need to actually lay out a code of ethics, but I can't think of a single boss that doesn't understand the importance of "improper use of company equipment". This isn't a technology issue. This is exactly what it sounds like, an ethics and conduct issue. If the mail room clerks were steaming envelopes open, or sending cocaine by FedEx, it would be exactly the same problem.
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
It's not uncommon to have a higher ethical obligation to provide food, for, say, a child, which takes precedence over your ethical obligation to quit rather than work unpaid overtime. If the OP is basically incompetent, he may not have any additional job choices which would allow him to fulfill the first obligation in order to satisfy the second.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
It would also weed out anyone who has an idea the guild doesn't want to see implemented, or who wants to enter to field to compete with whoever's excessively paid.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
I'm curious, since I really do not know your situation. Why would you work for 20 unpaid hours? If they force you, can't you find a better job?
There are either hourly workers or salaried workers, if you're salaried, did not you agree to being paid a fixed amount?
Not sure how your point relates to ethics. It seems as you are doing the compromise in accepting such a situation.
If your argument is that "salaried" situations are unfair, I can agree but I don't know if that is really an issue of ethics either. There will always be jobs where the physical amount worked does not directly equal compensation.
Linux Resources
I think the problem here is that most of these sites get paid for clicks / ad-loads. So you actually are contributing to the financial welfare of the hosting site simply by looking. The result may be increased demand for such images.
It's interesting how the article tries to make the mind depict the worst possible scenario. For all you know these "naked people" were his wife/child. It could have been bath or breastfeeding photos. You know the same type of family photo Walmart confiscates and calls the police on causing a perfectly normal family undue misconfort socially and legally. I am pretty happy cameras have moved away from film.
If faced with a tough situation I'd be pretty stuck, however if faced with a tough situation and policy I wouldn't. Personally, if I worked in IT then anything dangerous or in gross violation of policy would be reported (child porn, etc.). Anything personal I would not (e.g. affair, health problems, etc.).
"Oh boy"
I can understand the kiddie stuff. But what's wrong with asian women? Last I checked, asian women were beautiful, and there is nothing illegal about viewing them. It may be against company policy, but THAT is not worth calling the FBI over.
I know what the author was trying to get across, and there was plenty of cause to call the FBI, but lumping the asian women with children is just demeaning to the women.
For linux tips: http://www.linuxtipsblog.com
There are two sides to this coin. I've been on the other side, where I was asked to record/intercept emails to/from certain parties, transparently, for security reasons. We suspected they were dealing out trade secrets (and probably were, I never found out).
In this scenario, I believe the Company is perfectly within its right to do so. As I understand the law (and that's gray to me), once a packet enters the Company's network, they own it. Period.
Anyone have something to add to that? It was an odd predicament.
If I had mod points I'd cite this as insightful. You raise a good point. Salaried employees are paid for 40 hour work week, but average much more office time. Do those employees receive a discount (comptime?) at the end of the year? Most likely not so it is an ethical question to post to the employer.
Now, the other side to that discussion is understanding the that typical salaried employee is not *working* eight hours in the day. Even removing 10 minute breaks and lunch the average time spent actually working is only 3 to 4 hours a day. (I cannot remember the article at the moment). We talk to co-workers, surf the net, stare at the screen, but we do not (nor cannot) produce a full 8 hours of productive effort.
So, the 50 or 60 hours spent in the office may actually add up to 5 or 6 hours of productive work a day still leaving us "short" on the salaried contract of 40 hours paid time. Thus are the workers being ethical?
What is lacking is the 40 hour work week pay structure. It does not fit the information age work place found mainly in development/enginerring shops today. Since I started in my profession many many moons ago I have never understood this mentality of 9 to 5, 40 hours a week. I work on projects. SOmetimes I work better in the early morning, sometimes at night. there are days when my brain is stuff with wool, days when I cannot be stopped. Yet up until recently I would get in my car, drive to a uninspiring cubicle and attempt to think for "The Man" to justify my salary.
Thankfully these days I now work at home, adjust my schedule to fit my personal and professional needs, and still make my project dates. I have a boss who understands how to manage that situation for which I am blessed. At work they block web sites, streaming radio, and even hae a policy on headphones so like a 1984ish nightmare I am to sit and work work work till the whistle blows.
Okay, I digress, but I do feel there is an ethical issue when companies attempt to keep you "working" past 40 hours without some compensation, but we do have to understand that generally we are marking some time during that work day, it is not all production.
Good point!
Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter
This isn't specific to IT, but it happens a lot.
Most newbie Admins poke around in places they shouldn't soon after getting heightened access to the systems.
Almost anyone, in any career where they have access to sensitive information end up abusing it to some degree.
Doctors, Nurses and medical records people read the files of friends or relatives all the time, and that's certainly illegal.
Also, if you come across that kind of stuff in your routine work, you are actually required by law to report it to the police.
After 15+ years in IT, all data looks the same to me.
I can help someone adjust the font on a document and not even notice what it says.
Sorry to ask, but why simply looking at images of children porn is usually seen as a problem? I'm all for sending to jail those who make such images, those who distribute them for profit, and those who pay for them, since all of these persons are directly or indirectly harming children. But just for looking? This is silly.
Because those who look at them create a demand to produce them.
How is this insightful, and http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=295453&cid=20573835 is a troll?
Interestingly, the pizzeria in which I heard some juicy rumors about my CEO's actions in the mens' changing room of the municipal baths has a squirrel as its logo...
I don't know where you live, but in my country the employer has to state in advance that usage of PC equipment and internet resources can be spied upon. Otherwise viewing porn at work is not a firing offense.
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Not too many years ago I worked for a "web startup" (i.e. small company founded by Harvard MBA who smoked lots of weed, drove a VW, and was out to "save the world") as IT manager. As the market tanked, the CEO became more and more concerned for the future of the company and with good reason! We'd gone from regular upper 6 figures per month to less than half that, with three locations whittled down to essentially one and a half. Many employees left for greener pastures. When things REALLY started to go down hill, the CEO asked me to intercept any emails between current and former employees, and then "hinted" that since so many of our clients had their email hosted on our email server, couldn't I do the same with them. I know that, legally, he had the right to get access to current employee email, and any former employee whom he had granted continued use of our email system (not sure on that last bit, IANAL). But asking me to, or suggesting I should allow him to, read client emails was a final straw. While he may have the "legal right" to read employee emails, it left a very bad taste in my mouth. Suggesting I allow him to read client's emails? It was like licking a rat. At the end of the day I had to go home and see myself in the mirror, and I knew that reading other people's personal, private emails was something so abhorrent. (Rimmer: "Lister, that is my private, personal, private diary; full of my personal, private, personal things." Cat: "It's gone public.") Now all that said, at another job, myself and some other IT workers suspected one of the devs of possibly being a pedo. We didn't read his emails, we didn't pour through his computer (which we could easily have done), but we did put google to good use, and at one point we did packet sniff where he was browsing. Was I proud of that? Well, actually yes. If he HAD been looking at kiddie porn, if he HAD been a sexual predator, being a father how could I stand back and not try to do something? It turned out he wasn't a diddler, just... Really really really really creepy. It is a very fine line between "ethical" and "non-ethical", it can be very hard to judge which is which, and everyone will have their own opinions. But in the end you have to live with yourself, and certainly I'm not qualified to decide right and wrong, nor pass judgment. If I had my way, anyone who sold a poorly made curry would be strung up and boiled in oil.
I think one thing that is really overlooked/not mentioned here is what about employees of ISP's? As a former director of IT at 3 different ISP's in the 90's, there is/was a huge grey area for what is ethical and what is not regarding personal information being stored/used in on an ISP's servers.
Although it is largely a moot point today, at my ISP's we had shell servers and FTP servers with personal storage. Our AUP made it painfully evident that those servers belonged to us, and that the user had no privacy or expectation of privacy on those systems. Can't tell you how many times I had to deal with an idiot chmod'ing his FTP home directory to 777 and then putting pictures of his wife on it. I even had an employee that we fired because he was sucking down questionable pornography and putting on his 777'ed *WORK* account to download from home. (Plus he was sexually harassing co-workers and co-workers wives...).
We also had the issues of usenet porn to deal with. I had a script that delivered me statistics on the NNTP server, and every single week at least one (if not more) of the top 10 highest volume groups on our servers were child-porn groups. We removed them as fast as we found them, and even had at least 2 subpeona's from the FBI related to child-porn and our shell servers.
Then there were the bounced emails. I'm amazed today how many users we had who had no issues at all sending naked pictures of themselves or their wives to anyone on the Internet. But what really shocked me were how many didn't bother to type in the correct email address and they ended up in our bounced spool. At the time, we had a policy of assisting end users in retrieving emails sent to them incorrectly, which meant I'd end up going through 1300 hundred emails a day sometimes trying to find one for someone that was really important.
We even had an end-user who was subscribed to a porn email list, who would regularly call my help desk when his mail spool got too big (downloading 30mb on a 9600 baud modem...uh huh, that will work, right!) and ask them to go through them and delete the ones he already had.
I'm unaware of any ISP that doesn't state that traffic/information flowing over the Internet, especially their portion of it, is completely private. And at any given ISP, there has to be tens if not hundreds of workers with the ability/access to packets, files, and other ephemra on their network. Its a very fine line between what the ISP owns and what the end-user owns. Just ask the guy who called up asking us to delete a newsgroup (yes, in its entirety, from the internet) after a camera was stolen from his house with pictures of his wife on it and posted to Usenet.
Add to that 802.11, and it gets uglier and uglier.
A code of ethics would be invaluable for 2 reasons: 1) it would give IT professionals the ability to self-police in a sane and rational manner, and 2) it would give the IT community itself a voice in the creation and wording of such policies. I shudder at the thought of a bunch of PHB's and lawyers trying to put together ethics for the IT profession. Leaving the choices presented in these ethical questions/dilemma's to individuals is a bad idea, because everyone has a different personal moral canvas. I just don't see how a 21 year old help desk geek would have the maturity and capability to make the right decisions on what needs to be done. And I'll bet these decisons get faced every day.
Bill
a code of Ethics?
I'm British, and here, our ethics are what we are brought up with. That's what being an English Gentleman is all about. When your respondent said:
"It's not ethical to make war on your neighbours. Thus, there are no ethical guidelines for it."
he was going against 2000 years of European history. There certainly are ethics in war, assuming war is fought between gentlemen. I can remember sitting in an IT Security government working party, and hearing the US representative actually propose that if schools gave lessons in IT ethics no one would write viruses!
I think this US requirement for written rules, as opposed to the European idea of working to an unwritten code derived from a historical upbringing, is a major difference between our cultures, and one which is rarely appreciated. It's what we mean when we say that Americans lack 'culture'.
Because there are already professional certifications available for IT people. Speaking from personal experience they currently make bugger all difference to fees or salaries. If you were to require such certifications then the reduction in supply of IT personnel would cause the salaries of the certified to rocket... As it has for lawyers, doctors, accountants etc.
No? Not willing to pay up? Oh well then, you can't really complain.
Deleted
If you have morals and intelligence, you usually don't need ethics. The trouble is, there are a lot of amoral and immoral sociopaths who don't know the difference between right and wrong, and morons who can't figure it out, either. And codes of ethics that are occasionally beyond reason and sometimes in themselves immoral; the one cited in the blurb, for instance, where ethics prevented someone from snitching on a child molester.
In the IT profession I'd say there are fewer morons than sociopaths or psychopaths, although I'll grant that most morons, sociopaths, and psychopaths are in the board room.
-mcgrew
I follow your logic, but I still disagree.
Privacy is a rather "slippery" thing. The U.S. Constitution never specifically guarantees anyone a "right" to privacy. Neither to any of the Constitutional amendments. It's more of an "implied" individual right, subject to interpretation. (Just being defined as a "figure in the public eye" can drastically change your ability to sue someone for publishing photos taken of you without your permission, for example.)
Ultimately, I think people only retain the amount of privacy they're willing to fight to maintain.
So yes, in the workplace it's understood that legally, when push comes to shove, the employer will prevail in the courts if they decide to snoop around on the computer assigned to you. That doesn't mean the I.T. staff should go around disrespecting people's privacy on a regular basis, just because "the law lets me do it".
The law says it's ok for me to sit on our mail server and start opening up people's mailboxes, reading the contents of all their email too. As an employee, would you really be ok with that, knowing I was doing that all the time at your business?
I know, as an I.T. admin myself, I'm constantly trying to do my job, while still respecting people's privacy (whether it's legally protected or not). To me, it absolutely comes down to "ethics". I understand that despite what the *law* says, people still feel like the company property assigned to them for their use during the workday is *generally* not subject to snooping. That's why we have logins with passwords on them, and email isn't just collectively sent out under a heading of the company's name. (The Internet connection and mail servers might be owned by your employer, but they don't really own your thoughts, put into writing, in individual emails, right?)
Devil's advocate time...
OK, so let's say you run into some data on an executive's PC at work that indicates they're siphoning off some money for themselves. Or that a product they make is known to be defective and dangerous. Do you:
a) Run and tell the SEC/CPSC?
b) Tell your boss?
c) Just let it go?
I say (c) is the best choice for you personally. Why?
Choice (a) will rain down hellfire on the company. As soon as it hits Yahoo Finance, the day traders will drop the company's stock price by 25%. Even an unfounded tip on a stock board can crater a stock's price. The entire IT department will be outsourced to some other country to save costs. You will most likely be out of a job.
Choice (b) may feel good in the short run, but might get you branded a troublemaker. You'll most likely have to change jobs because of this if you ever want a raise again.
Choice (c) is unethical, yes, but safe for you. Even if it's found out later on, you won't be the one they subpoena for the court cases. Plus, you get to keep your job until the inevitable mess happens.
Think about it this way...no one is truly ethical anymore. Everyone's got their dirty laundry--and it's best to keep silent if you want to keep your sanity. You can bet the executives and board members of most companies aren't acting ethically 100% of the time.
That would weed out all those unethical assholes in IT.
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but I can read your email...
Take me for example, so far I've been layed off twice for being honest. I'm a contractor so they can do this easily in the UK. :
1) Found a colleague stealing equipment, I was walked off site and given 2 months notice. (nice financial bonus)
2) Colleague was using other people's credentials to log into major health care systems WITHOUT the user's permission. Reported and.. guess what, 2 days later walked off site and a months notice
It just doesn't pay to be honest. Management are too scared of looking like fools.
Posting as AC for reasons that will become obvious shortly...
1) One day the CFO grabbed me, and had me help him with a printing problem. The document he couldn't print was a spreadsheet with the current salaries for the entire IT staff. He never thought twice about having me sit down in front of it to work on the problem. The only thing that really shocked me was that for such a small company, and even smaller IT shop, they were paying the IT director over $100k.
2) Then later at the same company they were making some changes in the organization. They wanted some of us to move to another city, while others would be shown the door. I was offered a position in the new city, but wasn't that happy with the compensation. So I snooped through Exchange, and found out that I wasn't being compensated commensurately with the other people who were also offered jobs. So I turned them down.
These would be the only times I've had ethical "issues" during my career. At least giant ones. And I feel really bad about #2. Honestly I do. The thin rationalization that I have is that it was in my best interests to know what I found out. It bothered me so much that I ended up being way to loyal to my next employer, to my detriment. But that's karma for ya.
My last job my primary responsability was as an e-mail admin. Because of SEC regulations we had to keep every piece of e-mail that came in, including personal e-mail used on the corporate system. We had an anti-spam filter in place to keep down the number of spam messages that get archived to keep the volume low(er). Part of my job was to monitor it to reduce false positives, figure out why they got caught, adjust the filters, and remonitor. So I had to read e-mails that get caught. I saw no moral problem doing it and occassionaly coming accross a personal e-mail with profanity, or sexually explicit material. Depending on the recipiant, I'd give them a hard time about it. but I never went in just for the heck of it...
- Asian women, men in porn
- Asian children in porn
Or, does it mean;
- generic Asian porn
- generic pictures of kids in NON porn situations like one might run across if one were looking into culture of the far east.
You can like Asian women and seek out that sort of porn without liking Asian children in porn.
There is a HUGE difference between porn at work (a common thing) and KIDDIE porn at work. One is just something you can get fired for. The other is a felony.
The phrasing in the summary seems to imply the latter is what is going on, in which case you need to check your morals at the door and adopt whatever the company says is OK. (And that seems to be that a bit o-boobies searching is fine since the HR department didn't do anything about it.)
Just because YOU don't like porn of adults, doesn't mean you need to be bugging the FBI about it. If it was real child porn YOU ALREADY COMMITTED A CRIME and acted immorally by not going to the cops with the information.
Right on. Look at doctors and lawyers. Their respective codes of ethics are not fool proof either. The person in the article made a conscious choice not to report the possible illegal activities to the local authorities. It would still be up to the moral compass/situation of the individual.
Sig it.
Except of course that you're wrong. Courts have upheld the right to use company phones for occasional personal use. Recently, they have ruled simillary for the web or email (I can't remember which). I also don't ever recall a court allowing a company to spy on telephone call, even though they owned the equipment.
You don't lose your rights when you enter a workplace.
IT workers need to know their place. They are not the moral and ethical police, judging what crosses their networks. They are to simply solve problems, install software, and pull cable. IT people don't own the infrastructure, the company does. It's not Joe-Cablepullers job to snoop desktops or read email.
If and ONLY if they come up against something blatently obvious (ie: porn screensaver, confidential documents being emailed, etc), should they have some sway. but ACTIVELY snooping, sorry joe-cablepuller, windows-reinstaller, and router-rebooter, thats not your job.
Yes, there is no personal privacy for junk on corporate computers. The more interesting issue is when IT accesses machines that are limited-access. For example, take the Personnel Dept (I refuse to use the insulting term HR) and its database of employees' salaries, home addresses, background checks, etc. That info clearly is not for view by IT members, regardless of their root privs. The difference here is that an employee gives info to Personnel with the understanding that it is not for general dissemination, as opposed to the company's right to look at anything that is on the employee's desktop machine.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
You're not required to find work if you have none to do (for whatever reason). You're required to do work which is assigned to you. That may mean only 10 mins of productive work per day.
Deleted
Um, guess what? All that stuff can be encrypted. Get with it, people. If it's possible to log in to someone else's computer as their user, you're living in the stone age. Worried about network sniffing in the age of SSL? People reading your email in the age of PGP and encrypted folders or partitions? If you work in IT, you should have some idea how and where your computer stores data, and how easy that is for others to read.
"Bryan, the IT director for the U.S. division of German company, discovered an employee using a company computer to view pornography of Asian women and of children."
And how did he know this, if he wasn't LOOKING at the damned stuff himself?
1. Someone looking at adult porn is not an "ethical problem", unless you got your ethics from the bible belt.
2. Someone looking at kiddie porn isn't an "ethical problem" either - its a legal problem! Like in "against the law".
3. Not reporting it because you would have to admit you were snooping on other people - priceless AND retarded.
Kevin Smith on Prince
IT is a smoke&mirrors payper liesense hostage 'industry'.
there are no ethics involved, so entry level requirements are for less scruples than you arrive with. see you there?
mynuts won, not much help with the charade.
Did they tell you that you would be working a 40 hour work week when they hired you? If you think that your compensation(pay plus benefits) is inadequate for the work you do, look for another job. There are lots of companies willing to pay value for good people.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
The previous Sr. SysAdmin at my current employer was indiscreet when he found objectionable material. Such that, not only did the person with the objectionable material go away, but so did the SysAdmin. Rule of thumb: if management *does* respond appropriately, DON'T SHOW IT TO ANYONE ELSE.
Of course, that being said, he's gone, and I got pulled in. So I'm happy.
Though it may not best way to hide my online "tracks" at work, I use a USB stick with portable apps. :)
No data stays on my work machine. I am sure it could be detected, but considering our IT staff, for the most part, are less knowledgeable than myself I doubt they will ever know.
Now don't get me wrong I am not browsing porn...I simply read slashdot and maintain some other forums. Not likely to find any illegal stuff on my stick anyway.
I was once told that we were not allowed to clear our cache! Which I promptly started doing.
They have recently informed us that they are going to be using a disk imaging application to monitor our usage...but I suspect it will not be set to monitor removable drives...
If anyone has any tips...let me know
"Thus, based on legal advice, my employees are instructed to notify law enforcement *before* notifying management"
And who wants to fuss with that. My advice would be to (a) never look at anything that would cause you to be forced to report anything (b) if you do, make sure no one else knows and pretend it never happened (c) if caught in a dilemma, tell your boss anyway and say you weren't sure if this applied and you need his/her guidance.
That's the only sensible thing to do, but I realize you can't give that as official advice.
And people think we can trust the government with this kind of power too!!
There is nothing wrong with looking at them. Tight-assed fascists will tell you that demand stimulates suppply, and so you should ban everything, but they're just getting their rocks off by going mad that someone, somewhere, is happy.
Of course you should stop people raping children. You should stop people raping anybody. But the idea that you should ban CGI shots of kiddieporn because some anally-retentive freedom-hating scum with a control obsession claim that it causes child rape, without any evidence at all, is just absurd.
I've been pondering on that too. But if a person doesn't buy (left alone click), the value of a page view diminishes (the advertiser will certainly monitor the result on investment). Yet the bandwidth costs are certain to go up.
Bert
Who is wondering why there isn't an "governmental approval" system for porn-sites. If you see the logo, the pictures on that site are OK. The logo could make mention of the minimum age (because the situation is muddied because in some countries the minimum age for pictures is different than that in others). Watch a porn site without logo at your own risk. People running porn sites can attract visitors who want to enjoy porn without a bad conscience.
At one place I worked in the past, my manager, who was a close personal friend of mine came to me out of the office with quite the situation. He found, through reading emails that there was a full on, unprofessional grade prostitution ring going on with about 10-12 employees in the company and 2 of the female employees.
Being both young and single, our major issue was, do we turn them in or partake? After drinking some beers we decided that we'd find a way to partake in this at great discount of course. Perhaps lucky for us the next day there was another person who worked under the same manager but his job was to scan emails found it. Our dreams of sexual gratification at work went down the tubes.
Strange thing is once it made it to HR there were somehow no rumors, no scandle, nothing. The employees silently got let go and all conference and office room doors were replaced with doors that had windows.
Please give examples of companies that don't state this in their employee introduction sessions that also give routine computer access to their employees. I have yet to see any employer who didn't have specific written policies about this.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
Obviously? Just as the very definition of "child porn" varies greatly even among the individuals of a geographic community, this whole thing about the ethics of overtime is a problem of our own doing. Why do salaried employees feel the need to work 60 or more hours per week? Because all the other salaried employees feel the need to work 60 hours per week and one has to compete to keep one's job. And don't come back with that nonsense about all the time IT people "waste" doing things unrelated to their work; no one can sustain 8 hours a day of sustained concentration on such complex problems without going batty. Muscles might be able to recover after a few minutes of rest, but the human mind is no mere muscle and requires different recovery patterns.
If IT (or any other salaried) employees had any sense they would begin organizing toward ending this practice of compulsory overtime. Call it unions if you will, that's essentially what's going on - but labor unions effectively ended this problem for auto workers who once faced the exact same issues. Granted, IT workers are rarely beaten and carried to the gate for "causing trouble," but the pattern of corporate exploitation in this society now parallels that of the earliest days of the industrial revolution in many other ways. There are other forms of coercion and abuse than physical, and modern corporations have carefully crafted the laws to maximize their ability to practice this culturally toxic exploitation.
There is no question that Microsoft does not have any respectable ethics as a corporation (employees are expected to do whatever is perceived to be profitable for them in money and power, especially in the short term), and their behaviour could be seen as exhibiting a greater influence by leadership than SCO's on the broader industry.
1. join the consipiracy, or
2. quit
Blowing the whistle makes you a big target. Ignoring the problem makes you guilty.
Get on his/her good side.
The ethical thing would be to not be the IT guy who's responsible for snooping on users in the first place.
Blindly following the law is among the most unethical behaviors I can think of, and a pretty poor excuse for why you did something, too. "I was only following orders"?
Liberty in your lifetime
Apparently he did report it but his superiors decided to shelve it. Not too terribly surprising given the fact that most of these "internet usage" policies are pretty much just paper with no teeth (at least in my experience).
All employers are the same. Overreporting your hours is "timecard fraud" whereas underreporting them is simply "getting the job done." So your answer is to shop around for a boss who writes the rules in your favor instead of their own? Good luck with that.
Ok, wait -- so the guy has such a problem that he looks at Asian kiddie porn AT WORK and so they transfer him to China?!
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
That'll teach them for sending poisonous toys to the US!
blah blah blah
I count myself to be fortunate in a job where I don't have to slog 60-80 hours a week. But many people are not that lucky. "Take another job". Very easy to say. Do you even realize that almost everywhere in the software field the engineers are "expected" to put in 60 hours or more a week. In some good companies, at the end of the project you are allowed to take couple of weeks paid vacation, but its rare. Not everybody has the luxury to walk out, and money does not grow on trees. People don't like to be exploited, its just that sometimes there is not much choice. You always have a choice, but sometimes its the devil or the deep sea, or Out of the frying pan into the fire.
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
1. A system administrator can always access your files, sometimes not intentional, sometimes when hunting for excessive disk usage. If an employee doesn't recognize this - well that's a question of stupidity. It's also a reason to keep sysadmins happy... 2. If a sysadmin encounters truly criminal data it's a legal matter and not a management matter. However even here the sysadmin has to use discretion and be selective. - Does the exposure really validate an invasion by the FBI (or whatever your favourite organization is) or is it maybe better to just delete the files and mumble something about corrupted filesystem... System administrators belongs to the support section of a company, which may be seen as overhead - the same overhead that the oil in your car engine is...
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
You're so cute when you're condescending. Of course, I have no idea who you are, but that's irrelevant. Folks like you who like to put other folks in their places -- or, put another way, like to espouse their own (supposed) morality -- are the very ones I'd suspect of doing such a thing.
For the record, I do agree with your statements, if not your paternalistic, pseudo-moralistic attitude. But, as system administrators, we also see things without looking: spam being mis-directed, porn sites in a browser's history, etc. Being a system administrator means two things:
- discretion
- common sense
Used in correct doses, you'll be good. Draw attention to things that are illegal, and/or reprehensible. Forget you saw the rest. And don't snoop. Simple, really. (Of course, one is taunted by Dogbert's "What good is power if you can't abuse it?" The answer is that, if you abuse the power, sooner or later, someone will find out. And, if done in the "right" way, it could even be illegal.
Because it:
That's why. Whenever you don't understand a corporate decision, just ask yourself, "Who benefits from this?", and soon the reason will become obvious. It's not that corporations make non-sensical decisions; rather, that corporate decisions are often motivated more by internal politics and the need to maintain a semblance of professionalism than anything else.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
So what's your opinion on banning violent movies? And sports, football involves hitting people?
Repressing all outlets for a bad impulse leaves only one (very bad) option for satisfying it.
There are more serious instances of this too. Some people I interned with would abuse various Windows services to pop up (usually sexually explicit) messages on each other's screens. We were all friends there, and the whole thing was pretty much winked at, but the people involved ought to be answering "yes" here. 50% read confidential or sensitive information without a legitimate reason Everything relating to upcoming products is sensitive and confidential at most companies, but I'm sure engineers look at what other groups are doing even if it has nothing to do with their work.
Plus, I've read some of the Diebold letters, some of those leaked DHS memos, and some of the New York Times articles on leaked government this and that (it's still confidential, guys!). I bet a lot of you did too. I had no reason to look at most of them other than morbid curiosity, and I'm pretty sure that doesn't count as "legitimate". 42% said they had knowingly violated their company's privacy, security or IT policies Only 42%? How many of you have checked your email, a news site, or even (gasp) Slashdot on a work machine? I'll bet you violated your company's IT policies right there. Personally, I've also violated the security policies by installing cygwin, emacs, firefox and perl; by installing the Blaster patch early; and by not always locking the terminal while I go when I went for a coffee.
I've probably even violated my company's privacy policy, if not knowingly. I interned in hospital IT once, and I'll bet some of the scripts I wrote there violated HIPPA in some way, because HIPPA is byzantine. I bet if I'd worked there for more than a summer, I'd have knowingly violated it at some point. It's hard to debug database apps without seeing some rows.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
I'd have said at least 80% would. Mostly because most security policies don't deserve the name. They regulate to the minute what kind of tool you may or may not use (usually the tools that could save you hours of time are strictly forbidden because there was once a hint that a trojan was named that way), while at the same time it's no problem at all to click each and every attachment mailed to you.
When a law is bullshit, I ignore it. Same goes for company policies. Don't like it? Fire me.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
But they were already admitting to violating the old policies, so "keeping the policies up to date" doesn't gain anything. They already could have been fired for violating the old policy. "keeps corporate policymakers and HR people employed" is undoubtedly the real answer, but is irrelevant to concerns over whether there should be an IT code of ethics.
There is no easy solution to this problem; You either have people who believe in personal integrity ( what you do when nobody would ever know ), and you have those who don't. Those of us that do will always follow our own code; Policies won't help us. Those that don't still won't, the policies won't help them either.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Written, professional codes of ethics exist to make money for lawyers. If you don't understand the obligations and limitations of your profession after your training, perhaps you're in the wrong line of work.
We physicians have the Hippocratic Oath, which is a joke and quite out of date. Occasionally we DO operate patients to remove kidney stones, and medical students have to pay for their training - both are flagrant violations of that same oath. If a physician needs to be reminded that (s)he's not supposed to sleep with his patients or murder them, perhaps (s)he's in the wrong line of work too.
Yes the Oath has great sentimental value, and yes all physicians should hold the "do no harm" verse close to their hearts. However, having a "committee" sit down and pen a "code of ethics" for a profession in my mind is an exercise to make said committee feel important, and opens the door to endless arguments and lawsuits. Because if there's one thing life is full of, it's the "exceptions".
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
If you have time to snoop through somebody others computers, management obviously hasn't given you enough to do.
You have not reason to expect privacy when using somebody else's, mainly your employer's, computer.
Most people in the IT world don't bother to get professional certifications (at least in *nix land, not sure about Windows).
#include ".signature"
Because those who look at them create a demand to produce them.
So the IT guy who discovered the photos is just as guilty because he viewed them as well?
Normally this sort of stuff is in the employee handbook that's given out on the first day of work. Many companies also periodically require that employees sign a form indicating that they've read the latest version of it.
Well reporting it to upper management is possibly one of the worst things you can do. In the example he said he knew about the kiddy porn and report it to upper managment. Well, that was your first mistake. First thing you did was single yourself out as a trouble maker and a snitch. People don't like snitches, even if it is for a good reason.
Well he reported the shit and nothing happened. Well possibly nobody believed him so he outed himself for no good reason. Then most upper management blokes tend to run in packs. So odds are he outed his mark to a friend of his mark. The person he outed and the person he outed to could have booth been trading kiddy porn or the person he outed just simply said he wasn't to his frined. Who would you believe? So the only thing he did was paint a fat ass target on his ass.
I would have anonymously figure out a way to rig his computer to send all his kiddy porn to a "public" printer. The biggest fucking color printer in the place. Maybe one of those big ass HP with paper rolls on it. For extra kick I would have set it to go off when the office prude or church lady was standing next to it. Then I would fire the bitch off and stand back and watch the fun.
Mr Kiddy porn gets what's coming to him. I'm not on anyone elses shit list and I have a good laugh at someone elses expense. Of course the whole fuckign thing can backfire. I might not be as good as I think I am and the whole barking mess could fall right back in to my lap with a fat ass thund follwed by a clang.
but I'm that good.. so no worries...
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
My ethics prevent me from snooping outside the scope of my job but it wouldn't matter if I did because ethics also prevent me from reporting anyone for anything.
A cornerstone of my code of ethics is confidentiality. Outside a courtroom, no sensitive information I see or hear while working for a client will be disclosed to anyone.
There are no references or exceptions for the law in my code of ethics (although I do have a rule on pirated software). The reason is simple, the law is neither ethical nor moral. In fact, in many cases the law is decidedly immoral. Further, I am not a judge or jury and it is not for me to decide if what I have seen is in fact a crime or not. I leave that for my client and their attorneys to determine and for law enforcement, judges, and juries to contradict.
I am utterly baffled by anyone who thinks a different policy is appropriate. How could you call a code of ethics that turns someone into a state informer ethical?
I also think this story is a farse. Playing the whole 'child' pornography card is a plea to emotion that should be dismissed. This has nothing to do with the children and protecting children, it has everything to do with disclosing confidential and sensitive information and/or informing.
This seems a little odd. There are situations in which you would want to keep an eye on certain employee's computing habits.
Allowing these types of activities to persist can put the company in jeopardy. A good IT admin will institute a firewall which prevents employees from viewing pornography at work.
I guess these sorts of problems persist when you have IT managed by some mindless manager. IT should be managed by a CIO who has work experience in IT. IT employees should also go through extensive background checking.
They're using their grammar skills there.
I think option B was his case here.
As if he made it past the 5th grade, he can comprehend that "salaried" means just that. He doesn't get paid for 40 hours a week, they use 40 as a reference number to split his paycheck out evenly over the year. If his company needs him to work 60 hours, he does so without issue; as they should have no issue with him leaving early here and there, working 30 hours because his kid needs to be picked up early from school one week...
IEEE
ISC2, the organization that implements the CISSP certification
et al.
who wants to enter to field to compete with whoever's excessively paid.
If they were able to negotiate that salary from the corporate management, then they aren't excessively paid. Companies pay people according to their perceived worth. If you are willing to do the same job at the same quality level for less money, then not only are you being foolish in the personal financial realm, but you are devaluing the IT skill set for everyone else as well. Part of what a professional licensing organization would do is seek to maintain or raise the market value of the IT skill sets.
We are all just people.
The example given is particularly complex since the US netadmin spotting German pr0n-surfing highlights different social standards. A lot might depend on where the German was sitting. K1dd1e pr0n is highly illegal under US law, but AFAIK not so under German law. Snooping on employees is generally acceptable under US law (with proper notices), but may be illegal under Germany/EU privacy codes. Either one could go to jail. I'm a little surprised the USian regretting not going to the FBI. Does s/he feel a responsibility to protect Asians? Isn't that the locals job? or maybe mgmt? Why so personal?
Erm... you might want to give that some more careful thought. You could easily be charged with possession or even distribution if somebody else misread your intent.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
Oh, but they were *Asian*. And then he moved to *China*. He might start interacting with Asian women there. The horror! The horror! The horror!
Seriously -- why even bring up the Asian aspect at all, as though that's somehow relevant? I can understand being worried about children, but worried about Asian women? Give me a break.
Then the winter came, and the Grasshopper died. And the Octopus ate all his acorns. Also, he got a racecar.
I would agree with that effect, which I find unfortionate. Most of the real certification/licensure costs (which I don't cound MCP, MCSE or other technical certs) are not that expensive in test cost, just need years of experiance. (MD & JD are a huge exception) Accountants have to work 2 to 5 years under a CPA to become a CPA. I just like the idea of removing certification from unethical bastards. (See Nifong)
In God we trust, all others require data.
so you discover someone surfing porn at work... why not go to THAT person, and say "I can see what you're doing. Knock it off." Isn't that easier and more effective?
A strange thing I notice from experiance, it is the line managers with no real education that are unethical boobs. In other words, it is the technician that got promoted because they convinced an idiot that you don't need a peice of paper to manage. What do I know though, our most unethical managers around here have either no degree or only an associates in some form of applied technology.
In God we trust, all others require data.
Perhaps you know different IT folks than I do. Most of the IT guys I know would do very poorly in both of these roles.
I think the point of a "Professional Association" is that it would raise the risk of unethical behavior. Right now you get caught with your fingers in the cookie jar & lose your job, you'll have a new one in a few months, and the old job will likely only "confirm employment" because of HR policy. If there was a professional society companies could refer to, they might able to inflict a more serious punishment. Of course, given the lack of success with similar professional organizations in Law & Medicine in policing their memberships, my confidence level is low.
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
All five of my Unix admins would disagree with you. Oh well - what do they know? I love blanket statements.
In God we trust, all others require data.
I though I covered that part in the last two paragraphs. If your not good enough to get away with it, then don't do it. I think I'm that good, but I could be wrong. So basically depends on how big your balls are.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
Seriously, why would anybody admit any crime/policy violation just because someone claims it would be anonymous?
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
I'm sorry, but that's ridiculous.
How old are you, like 14?
I'm trying not to sound like a troll here, but for f*cks sake...
*sigh*
Some days it's like digg round here.
Okay, that was vague enough to be provocative, which I suppose was the idea to score an "Ask Slashdot".
What does "children" mean? Five? Ten? Eighteen? It matters, a great deal. If five or ten, he damn well should have called the FBI. If eighteen, big deal, have a quiet word to the guy and tell him everyone's surfing is being logged. But not knowing this fact, we have no way to judge what should have been done.
I have an ethics problem every time I get a paycheck for 40 hours when I've worked 5. Have to work on this.
Yes, I should have said "whoever one deems excessively paid", i.e., he's do the job for less if it came to that and it's better than his current job. I thought that was clear but I guess not. It's not being "foolish"; it's how markets work, dude. Competition for labor drives down the wages of those paid above what is required to get someone to do it, and pushes up the wages where there are labor shortages. If this is a novel concept for you, you really need to get out. Tell all merchants to stop trying to underbid others when getting their products to market. (Then again, I'm guess you're not above advocating the cartelization of the entire economy.)
As for the rest: get over yourself. Your work is what someone will pay for it. You are not entitled to special protection because you call yourself a "professional". When you advocate licensure, yeah, that "increases the market value of the skill set" in the same sense that banning competition with you will gain you monopoly rents. It's still a blight on consumers.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
I can name several groups of "professionals" that pay lip service to official "Codes of Ethics" while routinely violating said codes for personal gain. The only real way to for ethics to mean anything is for them to permeate a society: people act ethically because that's how they were raised, and consequently don't know any other way to behave. Dependence upon the law, professional censure or any other external influence to assure compliance with some arbitrary ethical standard is doomed to failure. There are just too many ways to violate a standard without any penalty whatsoever.
... or we're not.
Either we're an ethical society
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
A lot of the responses miss the point.
Salaried folks, like most of I.T., are paid for a job, not by the hour.
But, at least in the US, the 'normal' workweek, as our culture accepts it, is 40 hours. But in I.T. that does not apply, at least not anymore.
The past few years at every job and company I have worked for, and according to all the folks I know working at other companies, has expected a 'normal' workweek to be 45-50 hours as standard, not as the exception.
What that does to your health and life is profound. No time for family, no time for exercise, no time for personal or professional maintenance. You can not go to your kids play while you are babysitting a project in your cube. I do not care what kind of data plan you have for you video cell phone, it's not a substitute.
Now add projects on top of that expected 45-50 hour week, and what is left for anything outside of work? Little or nothing.
The problem is that it is perfectly legal, and that is what most companies use as their litmus test for 'ethical'.
In the US there are two categories of employee. Exempt and non-exempt. This refers to whether they are covered under the Federal wage and hour laws that require payment of overtime wages for any time over 40 hours a week.
Exempt means that you are listed in the law as being exempt from the over-time requirement. Computer programmers/admins, etc are one of the VERY few exempted.
http://www.dol.gov/esa/regs/compliance/whd/fairpay/fs17e_computer.htm
The threshold is low. A little over $11 an hour, if paid on a weekly basis, or a bit less than $30 an hour if paid as salary, and a couple other conditions are met. Conditions tailor made to fit I.T., so they are always met.
These laws were passed way over a decade ago at the behest of I.T. consulting firms based in NYC, like Anderson and Computer Horizons. I had a link, now defunct, listing the sponsors of the bill, some well known, and all considered 'friends of the working man'. Maybe, but certainly not the working nerd. (Even at the Federal level it appears, the hatred of geeks and nerds that starts in High School and extends to college, never ends)
If not for these laws, I.T. would be paid hourly just like any other skilled trade. And skilled trade it is. I know many, many programmers, sys admins, DBA's, analysts, project manager, and the like that never received a college degree of any sort. They all learned on the job or went to one of the many computer trade schools, Like Chubb, ITT, etc, that now are all but gone.
There is nothing in the law that FORBIDS paying overtime wages, either straight time of time and a half. But because it is permitted, companies will use it as an excuse to not pay it. The same as they would do to any factory worker or skilled trade like a plumber or electrician or auto mechanic.
In other words, it may be legal, but that does not make it ethical.
Remove the law exempting us from overtime and you would see a huge change in I.T.. Some bad, temporarily at least, most good. Like not wasting our time with crap assignments and ill planned work at all hours of the day and night. Maybe starting to actually think through projects instead of planning them about as well as Little Rascals productions with Spanky as the PM and Darla as the Lead. But that is another thread.
Let's be burtally honest here, the law is it at odds with itself when it comes to private communications at the workplace. Namely I'm talking about it's illegal for your employer to listen in on your phone coversations, but it's supposably legal for them to read your email. The main difference? Society's attitudes towards the individual and corporation's relationship when the laws were made.
So while you may be right that there's no "expectation of privacy" here, that doesn't mean that there's not an ethical issue. It merely means that you have the legal cover to read someone's email, it doesn't mean you should. Ethically, it's wrong. You shouldn't do it, no matter whether the courts say it's alright or not.
The courts are simply wrong when it comes to the issue of the expectation of privacy. People assume it is private. It may not be, but that doesn't mean that people don't act like it is. Thus, the ethical delima. Morally, there's no difference between reading someone's private postal mail, and someone's email. They're both communications in which you are not an intended recipient,
So how is one supposed to reconcile the legal and moral aspects here? Simple. If you don't have a reason to look at someone's email, then don't look at it.
The law says that it is okay for a company to hire someone to do that. If the company wants to dedicate someone to that, fine.
If you're doing it without being told to do it, there may be a problem. But that's an HR issue, not necessarily a legal issue.
Whatever. Here, all my users know that I can look through whatever they're doing. I will USUALLY call them and tell them that I'll be doing it, but if there is any problem I will handle the problem FIRST and worry about their feelings SECOND.
No. The login/password combination are to establish some base that you are you and that the stuff you are doing can be tracked back to you. Either positive or negative.
Wrong. That depends upon the country you are in. If you put it in writing, on company time, using company resources, then the company MAY own it.
If you do NOT want the company involved, do NOT do it on company time. It's as simple as that.
Because those who look at them create a demand to produce them.
Shouldn't that be "those who pay for them create a demand"? I don't see how it works if there's no payment involved.
No... my answer to that is to do one of: a) not work more hours than one is being paid, period; b) be at personal peace with working more hours than one is getting paid; or c) else find another employer that doesn't expect unpaid labor.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
What kind of soulless bastard needs a written code of ethics to know what's right and wrong?
A psychopath does.
They are about 1% of the population and apparently have a brain defect (akin to color blindness) that amounts to having no conscience.
If they don't "compensate" by voluntarily adopting a clear set of rules of conduct (or even if they do but the code is deficient) they are likely to become criminal menaces.
(It's also possible to learn behaviors that suppress conscience, with similar results. In fact this appears to be somewhat more common - at least among career criminals - than the actual mental defect. One expert in the field distinguishes the two cases by reserving the term "sociopath" for the latter - though "sociopath" is normally applied to either.)
Most of law, religion, and culture - along with the distinctions between cultures - is related to how to handle this fraction of the population. Teaching them rules of conduct (either to block misbehavior or to direct it only at outside-the-tribe groups), convincing them to adopt such rules (typically by teaching them that following he rules is good for "number one" - either in this world or an afterlife), penalizing them for misbehavior, separating them from the general population and warehousing, deporting, or killing them.
Because the suffering of others doesn't cause them mental anguish they can be some of the worst of people: Torturing, raping, and killing for their own fun. For the same reason they can be the best of people: They have to CONSCIOUSLY DECIDE to be good and work hard at it - which IMHO is far more meritorious than being good because been bad feels bad. And for the same reason they can do very well as decision makers and leaders, able to think clearly when making decisions where suffering and/or death are involved.
Compensated and partially-compensated psychopaths gravitate to positions in politics, management, sales, and crime. And those who have not fully compensated (a difficult task) occasionally cause headlines and distrust for all practitioners of those first professions when they combine one of them with that last one. B-)
So an executive who is willing to break the rules to indulge his interest in banned sexual practices by viewing banned or frowned-upon reading material on the company network is hardly surprising. What matters is whether he's compensated enough to restrict his enjoyment to reading material or if he'll also do some enjoying of it in real life (or let it affect his managerial decisions in an improper way).
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Why would you need an "ethical code" to prevent something that's against the law? In most companies I know, it doesn't have to be written that if you break the law (criminal, not a speeding ticket or such) at work or on the job, you're going to get fired and quite possibly given a nice police escort out of the building.
You don't have to have a "moral code" or "ethical code" when you've got a "legal code." This should IP whether you're a plumber, an electrician, or a computer tech.
"Because those who look at them..."
May be satisfied, and thus not harming* children. That sounds as reasonable, if not more so, as assuming that pornography induces demand without end. Since the studies are not being conducted, it is hard to guess if this, your or neither (both?) scenario is correct.
*Assuming that any and all sexual interaction between adults and children are necessarily harmful.
We don't have passwords to protect employee privacy, we have passwords to protect company information. Sometimes that company proprietary or company sensitive information includes employee information, but that's not the reasons employees have passwords.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
"Do onto to others as you would want done onto you" It is funny how useful that ancient logic is this modern world. In lieu of corporate policy or legal framework, use that to guide your ethics as you lord over the company's computers.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
See what I mean?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
an employee using a company computer to view pornography of Asian women and of children.... Subsequently the employee was promoted and moved to China to run a manufacturing plant.
jeez, sending someone who likes looking at asian women & kids to run a mfg co in China... that has stoopid written all over it...
Racist comment...
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
I can't speak for the parent poster, but I can tell you from personal experience that in my country an employer is not entitled to read an employee's e-mail, specificallu because doing so would be blatant a privacy violation. The only way to get access is via a police investigation, using a proper search warrant.
I recently worked somewhere for 2 months as part of an MBA internship. The company wanted to have access to the project history after I was gone. Due to the nature of the project, my e-mail history was a rather big part of that. They told me up front and I agreed, as I have more than enough e-mail adresses for use when I want to do something my supervisor was not entitled to know anyway (like searching for a new job, inclusing at that very same company). But IT told us that it could not legally be done. As a workaround, we had to create a project e-mail account instead of a personal one.
Linux user since early January 1992.
Yes, it's ethical. The company didn't chain you to a desk, hold a gun to your head or kidnap your family. Go home. You have tacitly agreed to donate your extra time to them.
You don't have an ethics problem. You have a disappointment problem with your current arrangement. An arrangement that you created.
I will never live for sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
What if I buy a car from a company that's been neglecting environmental regulations, dumping their wastes illegally or something? Am I a criminal then, too?
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
"discovered an employee using a company computer to view pornography of Asian women and of children. He reported it but the company ignored it. Subsequently the employee was promoted and moved to China to run a manufacturing plant."
I sure do hope that no one ever finds out that I like Asian, Hawaiian, Alaskan, and Swedish women!
*tightly closes eyes and crosses fingers.
Just to add a bit to that. If somebody is already willing to disregard rules and ethics enough to watch porn at work, that's not a great indicator. If they're going so far as to watch illegal porn at work, that's worse, it shows a very frightening (at least to me) disregard for rules, values, and consequences.
We're talking about a person whose personal cravings are already overruling that little warning in the back of one's head that says "this is wrong", "this is dangerous" or just "I shouldn't be doing this, especially not here." That being the case, how likely are they to uphold the rules/values/laws against actually abusing a child?
A lot of the IT professionals I've encountered that had certifications, it seemed to me, went through the motions to earn them, to prove that they knew something -- almost as if to compensate for their lack of instinct and knowledge, because they weren't very good. They didn't have that "computer intuition" that separates good IT professionals from the average-to-shitty.
Most of the good IT professionals I know don't have certifications, they let their work and references speak for themselves.
evil adrian
In todays world, ethics is taboo and almost forbidden given what some kids of the 80's learned in some games and some educational environments. I worked with a group of them a few years back at a short term project, and they thought nothing at all about rifling through someones files on their computer looking at files and all, searching for pictures and music files, in some instances, even personal correspondence documents such as saved emails and the like. One tech actually hooked up a portable drive and copied the customers entire catalog of MP3 files off of their computer without permission! They would also actually laugh and joke about some customer having to go in for surgery on their foot or something. Pretty disgusting to watch and overhear. Unfortunately the direct manager on the project at the time was an active participant!
I however was old-school, and we did have ethics and morals. This is not to say that many of the kids in the 80s educational circles didn't learn moral values and ethical behavior, but unfortunately a lot of them are deceptively evil. You have no way of knowing who is, and who isn't until a breach is actually discovered AND you can actually pin it on a specific individual or group of individuals. These people make it difficult for the rest of us to secure work and keep it because of the mis-trust that is out there.
What would be nice to have is a board somewhere with names and something identifiable of those involved in breaches of customer data and ethics violations that damage the customer. Many people don't understand the point that the customer is how you make your living. Many of these kids feel that if you get dumped here at this job, you just go across the street and work there for a while.
Sad but true.
All content in this message is copyright (c) 2008. All rights reserved. RIAA is prohibited here.
I would have anonymously figure out a way to rig his computer to send all his kiddy porn to a "public" printer. The biggest fucking color printer in the place. Maybe one of those big ass HP with paper rolls on it. For extra kick I would have set it to go off when the office prude or church lady was standing next to it. Then I would fire the bitch off and stand back and watch the fun.
Yes, please do vigilante justice. It's not like you'd ruin anyones life if you were wrong.
-- MrMud
That's flamebait, if I have ever heard it.
(I would rather assume it was either that or an attempt at sarcastic humor than to believe you just felt so passionately about the subject that you had to debunk his statement with what is obviously pure bunk.)
Yes, I could, done, and will do again when the need arrives. Sometimes vigilante justice is the only kind of justice.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
There are the IEEE Code of Ethics and the ACM Code of Ethics that frown on that kind of behaviour.
That said, abuse by those with technical power can only be contained either by division (and therefore dilution) of power or by aggressive monitoring.
This is a boring sig
i once read here on slashdot an awesome rebuttal to this statement, which compared it to media coverage of terrorist attacks. by the same "viewers create demand" logic, anyone who broadcasted or looked at footage of 9/11 should have been guilty of terrorism, because paying attention to terrorism creates demand for more. more people willing to blow others up in order to gain media attention for their cause.
I've been in IT for about 10 years now and I have, on occasion, come across people who have decided they have the right to use company hardware and company time to satisfy their penchant for porn. Personally, I take it case by case. If it's clear that it isn't significantly affecting productivity or network performance (be it bandwidth, e-mail server, whatever) then it's not worth sticking your head out for.
I have, however, come across users who are literally spending the majority of their day surfing illicit sites, filling their computer with garbage, and essentially being a drain on the company. Those are the users I've reported to upper management and seen fired for the actions. I'm not saying people should be allowed to surf porn at work, it's just not worth risking the backlash / distrust / hassle of reporting someone in some cases.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
Sorry to ask, but why simply looking at images of children porn is usually seen as a problem?
Because those who look at them create a demand to produce them.
Ordinary pornography can be a voluntary creation. Child pornography (when it involves the participation of an actual child - in a sexual situation or in the creation of an image that might affect his later life by adverse publicity) can not be voluntary, because the child is not yet competent to make such decisions and is prone to defer to adults. So the production of child pornography using actual children is involuntary exploitation of children, abhorrent to pretty much everybody but the pedophiles themselves (and even to some of them).
In the US at least, the legal system has justified attacks on the possession of child pornography as attacks on the demand side of its production - treating possession as evidence of purchase (or of giving other benefits to the producer) and purchase/etc. as accessory after the fact to production and before the fact to future production. This lets them ban possession despite first amendment arguments.
However the laws are written to also ban possession of prose fiction, drawings, and computer "de-aged" images of adults - none of which actually involve the abuse of minors in their production (as well as material where any child participation / exploitation occurred before the legislation in question). There is considerable court activity over whether the production and/or the possession such stuff is protected by the first amendment (or the ban on ex-post-facto laws).
Pedophiles who become actual sexual predators are notoriously resistant to both voluntary and involuntary rehabilitation. This leads to a multi-way argument among several claims:
- Child pornography (even that not made by exploiting actual children) leads to the formation of the pedophile fetish and its availability thus leads to increased predation.
- Child pornography (not made by exploiting actual children) can be used for sublimation by pedophiles and its availability thus leads to decreased predation.
- The issue is moot because the first amendment protects it.
- Child pornography bans can be used to suppress political speech on the issue of when a youth becomes competent to give consent and whether/how the current laws should be revised.
(It also leads me to breathe a huge sigh of relief that my own sexual preferences don't include the underage. B-) )
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
1.) Join company with only one guy in the IT department 2.) Attain a fetish for Asian Porn. 3.) Avoid FBI. 4.) Move to China... 5.) ??? 6.) Profit!
Presumably because it's a lot easier to abuse Asian children in, like, China? Perhaps this goon got himself transferred to China to sate his lust for Chinese kids?
Really, seem to me most IT professional I know took certifications to prove that they are willing to go above and beyond. That is what further degrees, certifications and other such stuff is for. Besides a really small group of high profile people within their area, "computer intuition" does not translate into promotability or anything. Who would you hire, the person who is good at programming but does nothing else or the person that is good enough in programming, but has taken the time to improve themselves by getting degrees and certs? If you say the former, you are most likely to be a bad manager or is it because you don't have certs and degrees?
In God we trust, all others require data.
Do I have moral rights to see these logs? Do I have moral rights to judge other people fetishes? Do I have moral rights to report others to the goverment forces?
Of course you can answer to yourself "yes" in all these cases. But your answer doesn't make this problem any less ethical dilemma.
I for example, can answer only "no". Maybe because here in MittelEuropa, cooperation with regime forces never was taken lightly. We know pleasures of totalitarism and societies build upon the nets of informers, spying on each other.
Hmmyeah I see your point.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Depends. Am I hiring someone to program, or to chase shiny certificates? Degrees and certs are great, but if you have other ways of proving you have the necessary knowledge and expertise, that's good too.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
Your assertion is certainly the most obvious reason people are assigned passwords on a company's computer network. But there's no reason why that has to be an exclusive reason.
I maintain that giving employees their own passwords amounts to giving them a certain level of privacy, AS WELL AS protecting company information (and aiding in having accountability for a user's actions).
Ask the typical employee why he/she is in the habit of locking their Windows workstation before going to lunch. I'll bet, if they're honest with you, they'll say something like "I don't want other people walking by and reading my email!", rather than "I'm afraid a co-worker will do something against company policy on my PC while I'm gone, and get ME in trouble for it!"
Competition for labor drives down the wages of those paid above what is required to get someone to do it, and pushes up the wages where there are labor shortages.
I agree with you that it is how it should work. I hope you don't think that's how upper management pay scale works in the real world. Given that the people in charge of the large organizations don't play by those rules, it makes little sense for the people that work for the large organizations to play by those rules.
From my own personal experience: I'm a stagehand, I used to work Off-Broadway on for-profit commercial shows (multi-million dollars budgets). Most of the stagehands that work in those venues have college degrees in stagecraft. The pay scale works out to a lower lower middle class lifestyle in NYC. $20 an hour doesn't go far in NYC. Forget raising a family on that here. Forget health insurance. There was a high attrition rate, but there was always a new batch of college grads that would fill the ranks. Then I moved on to Broadway. Broadway stagehands are union. The job is really the same, but we make twice as much money as Off-Broadway. The attrition rate is pretty low. People have insurance and can afford to have kids. The tickets cost twice as much for the consumer. Yet strangely, Broadway is thriving, while the Commercial Off-Broadway scene is slowly vanishing, so your theoretical "blight on consumers" doesn't seem to be happening. Granted there are unions out there who don't honestly factor in profits (or lack there of) when they are making demands in a contract negotiation. Not only do those unions give other unions a bad name, but they destroy their own industry. However, there is plenty of room between "destroying the industry" and "the minimum that someone will accept for the job" It's that difference that keeps the attrition rate low and allows for stagehands with decades of high level experience, those experienced stagehands are well worth the price of two or three fresh from college employees. In the non-union Off-Broadway scene those experienced workers never emerge because of attrition, but there is always someone willing to do the job. Now be it a union or a professional licensing organization, keeping the labor cost/value above the bare minimum, but within what the industry will bear, results a healthier more sustainable work culture. As for end-consumer costs, those are always as high as the market will bear, the only difference is the internal distribution of the cash flow. By doing any job for less than the guy who was doing the job yesterday, are you really going to save the consumer money or are you just increasing the year-end bonus for someone already in the highest tax bracket? You seem to have some sort of pride in your willingness to do-more-for-less, as though that will somehow make life better for the common man or will earn you the love and respect of the company you work for. From my perspective: you are the common man, make life better for yourself by attaching a (carefully considered) high price to your labor. A paycheck that supports a high standard of living is how companies show respect.
We are all just people.
What's "unprofessional grade" in the context of prostitution rings!?
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
Because those who look at them create a demand to produce them.
Well, it seems that computer generated child porn has been made illegal in at least some places as well. It isn't the harming of the children that's considered the problem, but the thoughts in the adults. Sure, there are other reasons cited (gateway porn or whatever), but it really comes down to prosecuting it as a throught crime. I'm not saying you personally do or don't have that view, but that many who claim "think of the children" still want it illegal when no actual children were harmed in the filming.
Learn to love Alaska
In the US at least, the legal system has justified attacks on the possession of child pornography as attacks on the demand side of its production - treating possession as evidence of purchase (or of giving other benefits to the producer) and purchase/etc. as accessory after the fact to production and before the fact to future production.
Hey why not? It works for drugs!
Oh... wait...
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Perhaps you know different IT folks than I do. Most of the IT guys I know would do very poorly in both of these roles.
Most of the IT guys I know do very poorly in their current roles. Yay for job market gluts.
Sure...
Like doctors who artificially constrain supply to keep their wages high. And who have done so for decades.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
But (in my experience) the company will never take issue with the first case, but always will with the second.
2. Someone looking at kiddie porn isn't an "ethical problem" either - its a legal problem! Like in "against the law". Yes, indeed.
3. Not reporting it because you would have to admit you were snooping on other people - priceless AND retarded. He did report it. It says so in the summary that you quoted.
3. Not reporting it because you would have to admit you were snooping on other people - priceless AND retarded.
Hrm... I thought IT was supposed to snoop? At least most companies I work for monitor traffic and programs you install to make sure you aren't doing anything horribly wrong.
I mean its the companies computer and bandwidth. They have a right to know what you are doing with it isn't wrong.
If you have personal stuff, either wait to get home or just understand people are watching and don't do anything shady.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
It's the logical conclusion of the line of reasoning that consuming something that was produced in a criminal act makes you a criminal. If it doesn't apply to the other two examples I gave, it shouldn't apply to people looking at kiddy porn.
People who dump toxic wastes are criminals. People who employ slave labor are criminals. People who rape kids are criminals.
People who buy or otherwise consume things made by such criminals in the act of their crime are not - or at least, should not be considered - criminals. They may not be of the highest moral fiber, being that it's good, though not obligatory, to boycott producers who do bad things to produce their wares; but that doesn't mean they deserve jail time.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Please won't someone think of the Asians!
The code of ethics is found here
I quibble:
First part, good. Second part, less good; it effectively requires you take no action over other ethical offenses that you discover during the course of your work, save when your action is dictated by law... if then. We are not lawyers with an attorney-client privilege, and I don't believe that society would be improved by our having right or obligation on those lines. While we should generally keep our mouths shut, and should not use the information we learn for our own benefit, there are some things I will not walk blithely past and stay silent about. Civil Engineers have no obligation to keep quiet about any bodies that turn up while working on a building project; neither do I.
Aside from that, it's a pretty good code. Add in the line from the Civil Engineers' code about "shall hold paramount the safety, health and welfare of the public" at the beginning and I'd post it myself. As is... still missing something.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
"And how did he know this, if he wasn't LOOKING at the damned stuff himself?"
RTFA:
"One of Bryan's duties was to monitor employee Web surfing using SurfControl and report any violations to management."
Erm... you might want to give that some more careful thought. You could easily be charged with possession or even distribution if somebody else misread your intent.
That's why you script it as coming from HIS terminal- complete with using a program that prints the machine and filename on the picture so that there is no mistake about where it came from.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
And there are no crooked accountants? Haven't the very largest accounting firms in the USA, regulated and certified, been responsible for most of the recent multi-billion dollar corporate scandals? They just found ways to work around the "ethical rules" imposed on them.
It's about culture. Most IT guys are "techies" not money-grubbing bastards (aka business executives, accountants, etc.) Most IT professionals have a sense of integrity, understand their power within the organization, and act reasonably responsibly. Some do not. Lots download stuff they shouldn't at work and read the HR department's email. Annoying, but not a big deal. What they don't do is copy the records from the accounting department and sell them to brokerage firms. They don't create bogus POs for themselves. The don't sell proprietary information to competitors.
I guess I'm saying that their are DEGREES of corruption, and in the grand scheme of things IT workers aren't anywhere near the realm of "the money people" when it comes to corruption.
I can understand the kiddie stuff. But what's wrong with asian women? Last I checked, asian women were beautiful, and there is nothing illegal about viewing them.
Thinkgeek (which shares Slashdot's corporate overlord) would evidently agree with your assessment of their appeal, as do I.
The problem is that, on average, Asian females tend to be more petite and flatter-chested than the average western Busty Bimbo counterpart. There are statistical outliers (Rin Aoki, Melissa Ashley), but that's the trend. Ergo, they look superficially younger... and thus, more like kiddie porn. I recall one pervert in some article about sex tourists ghoulishly gloating about this "advantage" when visiting East Asian brothels.
It's not inherently creepy, any more than any other sex kink or fetish. (Gentlemen prefer blondes, I generally prefer brunettes; however, everyone smiles for a redhead.) But it can hint at a bigger problem.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
LOPSA has had an extremely relevant code of ethics for some time, based on the excellent one developed by SAGE
http://lopsa.org/CodeOfEthics
"We as professional System Administrators do hereby commit ourselves to the highest standards of ethical and professional conduct, and agree to be guided by this code of ethics, and encourage every System Administrator to do the same."
What is important is to be able to show that the company had a good policy so that they have a legal safety net when they get sued. With a good policy in place you can blame the bad employee. Without one, the companyt has to take the heat for not setting up good policies.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
So you are making 80 grand a year on salary. Before I critique, I just want to mention that I was in your exact same shoes and was putting in 60-70 hours a week for a few years until I realized I had enough. I understand the frustration. If you are not happy with it or find it is compromising your ethics as you mention - you should seriously consider finding another job. Your work output is probably already starting to suffer, and eventually your employer will start to notice this. It may take you a week, a month, maybe even a year, so you should start as soon as you can. If you are worth your salt, then you will certainly find what you want. If you are unhappy with the hours and can't find a position demanding your skills, then you should consider refining your skills or educating yourself into a career that is more compatible with the hours you would like to have.
Now, back to the 80 grand a year - have you considered that perhaps you make that much because they are factoring in the amount of extra hours that are already expected in the position? Think about this answer and compare to a position of someone who was required to attend at minimum 4 years of college, assume debt, and probably are making less.
I'm shocked to read the sympathetic account of this Bryan, who was spying on a co-worker and discovered him to be a paedophile...
Had it been an FBI agent spying on anyone without a warrant, Slashdot would've been all steaming and screaming, even if the subject of the snooping were also discovered to be a terrorist (or a paedophile, for that matter).
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
If things go bad with no policy in place, that's a company/management screw up and senior managers must take the heat.
If things go bad when there are sound policies in place they han put all the heat on individual employees.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Um, how could he be 'wrong' about the employee looking at porn?? Either the women (and/or kids) are naked and fucking, or they ain't.
you're both right and wrong. yes, employees consider their passwords to protect their privacy, but the real reason behind them is to protect the privacy of the company and of anyone involved. for example, i work in a college IT department and at the college there are student employees in almost every department. my student employees have the opportunity to see things they probably shouldn't. they are required to sign a confidentiality agreement (they break it and they're fired and face the dean of students). offices are full of students (sometimes working in them, sometimes taking care of stuff), such as financial aid, payroll, etc. these students should not be able to see other students' grades, financial records, etc. that's why computers are locked when the employees step away. yes, it might be so people can't read their email, but that email might contain information that others shouldn't be looking at. employees at the college are given computers, email accounts, etc. these accounts and computers are for the purposes of working at the college and not personal purposes. while we all know everyone does personal stuff at work, you are not given the same type of privacy you would expect at home. the privacy at work is to protect the company/college/whatever from outsiders, but not to protect the employee from their manager.
please me, have no regrets.
Professionalism does not belong in a code of ethics!
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
So this professional association might be "Professional Information Technologists Association"? PITA, right?
If it's making him unhappy, how are we to know, otherwise? We should eventually eliminate his job, through automation, if it's a cause of suffering. If he doesn't enjoy it, chances are the next person in his position won't either. Communication is the exact thing that differentiates us from other animals. This is an example. There's a good chance the field he is in is overcrowded with people. So his post is evidence not to go into his field of endeavor. Judging from other posts in this thread, perhaps the whole IT industry could still loose some bodies and come out just fine. Perhaps 1st year university students should go into math, rather than CS, or CS instead of Software Engineering. In general, his situation, when viewed on a broader context, is a symptom of overpopulation on the world stage. His situation is a reason why we should use birth control.
There's benefits to his talking about his problems on an open forum such as this, which you are trying to remove from us. They may not be much, admittedly, but I don't think you're giving him credit for even that much.
what do I think? The more stories like this I read, the more I see consumption of goods and services as a necessary evil, something to minimize. I used to see waitresses as essentially fetish-objects of their customers, and have an extremely hard time going to restaurants, since doing so only ensures that there will continue to be people forced into being waitresses through the market. Now I'm starting to see more, and more jobs in the same light. His position is one that may need replacement, and soon.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Back in the early 90s, I was the sysop of a local BBS with about 50 members. This was just before the internet went mainstream in 1995, and people used Bulletin Board Systems instead, and they behaved just like internet forums do these days, except that all of the people are within local phone calling distance. The people on my BBS were mostly near my age, early 20s. As the sysop, I had the ability to read all private emails, but started out with the stance that it would be unethical for me to look. Eventually, one of the male members sent a batch of harassing emails to several female members. The first female that read one complained to me about it, and after booting him from the system, I ended up needing to read emails to delete the rest of the harassing emails, because they were pretty nasty and I didn't want them to be received. The BBS software was pretty basic, and to remove some of a person's received emails you had to page through all of their received emails. In the process of doing so, I discovered that one of the targeted females was using the BBS emails to coordinate the sale of illegal drugs to several other members. This prompted me to read all of the emails on the system. I found nothing else of interest and booted all of the druggie members from the BBS. It is interesting to me now that reporting the drug sales to the police did not even occur to me then. I think I was still in the mindset that what I was looking at was private.
Re #1: Its only an ethical problem if you think its an ethical problem. Most of it is pretty harmless/lame/stupid, so why not let people spend a few minutes once in a while looking at something they find easy on the eyes. Better than looking at this.
Re #3: He didn't report the kiddie porn to the police ... they're the ones who you report kiddie porn to, not your boss.
I can understand his frustration to a certain extent. Ever try to report child abuse? You'd better have a squeeky-clean past, because you can be sure that whoever you report is going to try to smear you. Its the same with accusing someone of holding kiddie porn. "Invasion of privacy" "You planted it - that's how come you knew where to look" etc.
Kevin Smith on Prince
As a 15 year veteran of systems administration, I adopted the following personal policy:
If you want to be trustworthy, act trustworthy. For me, this means ALWAYS assume someone is watching you, even if you run all the systems. You never know what other people are doing to see that you're being compliant.
That means if you are accessing confidential data you weren't supposed to access, that you WOULD get caught and you WOULD get fired if someone caught you doing it.
If you are accessing another users' system remotely without their knowledge or permission, you are in the wrong unless you've been given permission/authorization from higher up in the food chain. It doesn't matter *what* you caught them doing, nothing justifies violating the company's policy on privacy (or proper computer usage). NOTHING.
If they're surfing porn, that's their ass on the line. If you're accessing the system remotely without authorization, that's YOUR ass on the line if company policy prohibits this. In a company run properly, BOTH the end user AND the systems administrator should be sacked for their actions.
I've always said that if a systems administrator isn't trusted by the company, they SHOULD NOT be the systems administrator for the company. End of story.
Insanity is a gradual process; don't rush it.
Yeah, right - from their site - "Surf Control - URL- and keyword-based Internet filtering and blocking proxy ...
Look at the problems with names like Middlesex (sex), Scunthorpe (cunt), Experts-exchange.com (s-ex), ArkensasExtermination.com (sEx), The Vagina Monologs (vagina), Sussexx (sex), Anti-Kinderporno.de (an anti-porn site) (porn), SpornGroup.com, (porn), PartsExpress.com (sEx), ALittleGirlsBoutique.com (a stay-at-home mom's dress business), GirlsSchoolOfAustin.org ... Georgy (orgy), DuckpenIsland (penIs), Dildo (a town in Newfoundland), Woodpecker (pecker), Prickly heat (Prick), Smash-It.com (sh-It), Nosegay (gay) homogenized (homo), cumberbund (cum), cummin (cum), scum (cum), Bottled in bond aged 12 years (bond age)...
Gee, look at all those "evil" words.
The ONLY way to verify was to actually LOOK at the sites.
Kevin Smith on Prince
"Please won't someone think of the Asians!"
erm ... wasn't that the original problem ??? :-)
Kevin Smith on Prince
Your company doesn't have the right to read your e-mail because it passes through their system or because you're doing it on work time, they have that right because they own the account and/or computer where it's sitting. Your work e-mail account doesn't belong to you, and your work PC doesn't belong to you, nor do the backups of those systems. Assuming they've notified you appropriately regarding policy, your employer can look at anything sitting on your work PC, and anything sitting in the mailbox they own, or on backups of either of those two locations. That does't give them the right to read the data you send to an external e-mail system, or to look at an account you have in another location without a warrant.
The telephone, for the most part, doesn't work the same way. The telephone call itself may use company owned equipment, but it isn't sitting in an area the company owns(you might find you have no real right to privacy of voicemails on a company owned voicemail system, but you'll rarely find you don't have privacy for your phone calls).
I once worked at an institution who had an asshole as a sysadmin, who was also incompetent - great combination. I was also very sure that he read my emails, which was illegal. So one day when I was really pissed off I send a mail to my friend in which I constantly insulted said admin, at the end I even mentioned that I thought he'd read this but that he couldn't do anything as he couldn't legally read the mail in the first place. Sure enough, the next time I saw him he didn't greet, looked mad and flipped me the bird (while covering it with his other hand so no one else would see it). It was pathetic, but it made clear that he did read the mail, and that I was right, that he couldn't do anything. Every time I read about an asshole sysadmin I think back to this and feel good for coming up with a way to use their tools against them. Btw., not recommend for someone who actually depends on that guy (I was only there for an internship).
Viewing porn can be (and usually is) considered sexual harassment. It is punishable by immediate termination.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
If you weren't looking through blinders, you would know there could be several ways to see what the person was looking at without "snooping"...
.tmp file that the user hadn't saved when they accidently turned off the power strip, only to stumble across the material?
.jpg that isn't opening with the correct application, so you do a quick search for a .jpg so you can fix the problem (you can't just go to folder options, blocked by group policy) and its listed in the results.
How about you go looking for a copy of a
Or you have a filetype such as
Or someone reports that a particular favorite isn't working, and you go to the list of favorites and there is one called "Hot asain babes"
Or any number of other ways.
I work with it every day. You never know what you might run across.
Have you ever considered that "the problem you see" was actually the point all along?
My former employer has a "values" system, to which everyone has to subscribe in their day-to-day working lives. As long as you uphold the values, everything's fine.
One day, I was tasked with evaluating a piece of software that had been developed by a third party under agreement. It turned out that this software contained pieces of another program that we had written and that we had exclusively licensed to another party about a year earlier. Potentially, depending on the wording of the two agreements, this could have put us in breach of contract.
IANAL, but I had read a bit of contract law at uni, and I started asking legal questions about what we actually had the right to do with the software I was evaluating. Three levels of line management (who are also not lawyers) stood by and did nothing, in the hope that this was all above board and nothing to be concerned about. Nobody even asked what evidence I had about which I had been so concerned, and I never did hear a real legal opinion on the matter. It was at that point that I stopped working on the software.
With regard to the value system, it obviously presented me with a dilemma. Doing the right thing would have been to expose the negligence (not necessarily in the legal sense of the word) of people I had to work with. In other words, I had to choose one of the values at the expense of another: either expose the problem in the hope of solving it, or keep my mouth shut and hope nobody finds out.
Having already been blamed for enough of other people's problems, and therefore not wanting to draw any undue attention to myself, I kept my mouth shut. I've regretted it ever since. It was the right thing to do for one reason, but it was the wrong thing to do for another reason, and the latter reason was more important to me. On the other hand, the former reason is also exactly why everyone has gotten away with it: if it fits into one part of the value system, it's good enough for everyone, even if there is a contradictory, yet far more compelling, argument that also complies with the value system.
The point of the story, I suppose, is that it's often more important to be seen to be doing the right thing than actually to do it. People mistake this for incompetence, but in many cases, it's deliberate and insulting. I never believed in the values, because of obvious contradictions such as the one I experienced first-hand, and the subsequent tendency to abuse the values by justifying behaviour that would otherwise be unacceptable or even illegal. You may eventually get an answer to your question, but rather than satisfying you, it's only given to satisfy someone else's need to save face. They know they need to give some sort of an answer, but they don't think enough of you to make that answer credible. Feel the contempt.
(Oh, and in case anyone asks, I'm not naming them here. There are very few people who know me personally and don't know this story already. Suffice to say that my not working there any more is a matter of immense pride.)
Attack its weak point for massive damage!
That's really an "ethical" decision most other people don't have to make. After all, you're paid to fix the computer, you have to open file and examine them to test if email is fixed, or to make sure you've gotten all the viruses. In most cases IT staff is either looking at COMPANY computers (which as IT staff they have permission to do under company policy) or they're looking at personal computers (which no rules really apply to). Sure IT staff isn't supposed to read the big bosses email.. but on the other hand what kind of person hands over the machine with access to sensitive information, or rather what kind of boss puts their employees in the position of knowing stuff that would negatively affect the company outside their scope... who calls the low level tech to work on the company president's PC then gets upset that the tech rats out the boss is firing 100 people next week? Doctors, lawyers, accountants, all have strict legally enforce confidentiality.. if they happen to be tending you while reading bad stuff they're legally obligated NOT to rat you out except in very specific cases. IT staff are more like immigrant housekeepers, under paid, under appreciated, and not really managed well as long as the work gets done. The REAL question to ask is whether you have data on your machine properly secured from eyes you don't WANT to see it.. not worrying about what somebody might do if they saw your hidden stash of porn or cooked books.
Let me ask you: why didn't you just go to Broadway and skip Off-Broadway all together? You could have made over $20/hr, but still under-cut their regular stage-hand rate.
Dark Reflection
"our most unethical managers around here have either no degree or only an associates in some form of applied technology."
So are you trying to say that those in management that worked their way up the ladder with no/little formal education are more apt to be "unethical boobs"?
It sounds like you have a superiority complex. Just because someone who doesn't have a BS or better are somehow less qualified to be in a position of authority is absolutely without merit. And yes I "only have an associates in applied technology." Not all of us were in a financial position to go for a four year degree. the real world does preclude a multitude of great plans and ideas.
Don't blame me for redundant posts. I can't type very fast. Hence the user ID.
I can understand being worried about children, but worried about Asian women? Give me a break. Obviously, you've never seen them drive. Or even worse, parallel park.
It would be a very high risk to try that in China. In short order, you'd either be blackmailed, thrown in jail, or killed. Or some combination of the above.
Brought to you by the letters M, B and A, right?
Oh, degrees, as in angles/measurement...sorry, I thought you meant the other one.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
We are Systems Administrators. Yes we can read other peoples emails, we can look into other peoples personal lives, we could be stealing corporate data and selling it, we could grab the spreadsheets from HR and commit ID theft. We could do a lot of things... but we don't.
We don't because we have integrity. And frankly, that isn't the career path we chose.
Do we snoop? Sure, sometimes we do. I get to do it professionally as an auditor. I look to see what files are stored where on the network, and what access controls are in place to protect them. I capture data leaving the firewall to see if sensitive information is leaving the building, and I frequently get a glimpse into other peoples lives.
Want to know what I found?
I found out that most normal people live normal lives. If I see something I'm not supposed to see, then "I never saw it."
Guess what, secretaries, er, Executive Assistants have been monitoring the events and the goings-on in the office for decades. They know when forging the boss' signature is called for (in fact, I had a secretary that could sign my name so well that even I could not tell the difference). They know when to keep their lips zipped, how to be discrete.
Guess who else monitors my life - the Janitor! He has access to every room in the building. Same with the maintenance guys.
Do these people have a written code of conduct?
None that I'm aware of.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
This all involves the same company. As an employee, what can I conclude about my company's ethical standards? What should I do if I discover something 'unethical'?
Have gnu, will travel.
"Integrity: we've heard of it"
Browsing porn at work is no worse than reading slashdot. (Touché?)
In Scandinavia, people have taken this through the legal system and got a ruling. They are free to watch porn on company computers as long as it does not interfere with work. As long as it's legal, it's ok. No worse than a nightwatch reading a book and drinking coffee during the long hours. Oh, and ok. Slashdot is IT related, so you might get away with it even if it does interfere with your work.
I lost my sig.
So, you're saying that the certifications prove that they know something. Sounds like that's all positive and no negative.
"Instinct"? What discredited eugenics school (assuming it's not simply that you're bitter at not having gone to school) did you crawl out of? You are not a monkey, you're a human being. Your brain has incredible pattern-matching ability to be honed to particular skills and to fill with connected fields of knowledge. This ability is built through training - learning, repeatedly challenging oneself and feeding back into the learning. A good school will by definition provide this stimulation. The aim of a workplace is to earn money for its owners, so there's no guarantee that any amount of experience on the job has helped train a human to expertise in a particular field - it really depends what kinds of challenges they faced.
Because they want to make themselves good, or better. No-one is born an IT professional.
People are born black. Some people are born gay. Again, no-one is born an IT professional. You have some serious issues of elitism. Perhaps it is because you cannot even pin down what your skills are - let alone how you achieved them - that you resort to describing your worth in terms of something you magically achieved in the womb. Do you know how silly that sounds?
By your account of how a good IT professional is made, it sounds like you don't actually know many.
Have you ever stopped to think what a reference actually is? It's a circlejerk. As long as you haven't smashed your previous employer's servers in a drunken rage, your reference will be "he woz kewl, he did gr8 stuph". Your new employer writes the same thing. Until eventually an employee leaving a firm you're at writes a nice reference for someone about to leave for the firm you initially left. The circle is complete. It's just a way of saying "yeah, they're in the IT business and they didn't blow any shit up".
"Their work", of course, is a fair measurement of competence, assuming sufficiently challenging and maintainable. Example: There are way too many mavericks (open source movement, I'm looking at you) who are lauded for creating something that, thanks to undecipherable implementation, wouldn't pass first base in the corporate world. It's this kind of issue that formal training helps tackle - not because you're taught "how to document" but because training is about learning how to design, and that includes making a sufficiently general but understandable architecture (consider Knuth's concept of literate programming as an extreme).
Sure it's an ethical problem! That's why it's against the law.
Need to type accents and special characters in Windows? Use FrKeys
I don't think the issue is a matter of privacy for the individuals, but rather privacy of the company.
Saying that because this guy caught a pedophile, it's fine for him to break the privacy of many others, is like that Chinese attitude during the Great Cultural Revolution - killing 99 innocents is worth it if 1 rightist is killed.
From an organisational heirachy point of view, the technicians who'd be looking at this kinda stuff are far from senior level.
On the other hand, what happens if a low-level technician has access to executive-level corporation secrets? He could easily pass that kinda information onto competitors and no one would be the wiser.
Sure, work is work - people shouldn't expect personal privacy there. But if people's data is gonna be checked for inappropriate files, there should at least be some checks and balances and procedures for that kinda stuff.
~Jarik
I'm curious, how will his life be ruined if he's wrong? He'll get a whole couple of pages of code in hard copy form. Sure, that's wasting paper and trees are cut down to make paper and stuff like that, but it's not like his life is ruined, come on.
I'm sorry, but that is exactly what I am saying. I am replacing a guy who lost his position because he was an unethical boob without an education. Each one of the managers in my division that have lost their job or have been forced into retirement in the last 10 years just happen to have an associates only or no degree. By the end of the year, we will have only one manager without a bachelors and they are sweating bullets right now. It has become so endemic within my organization, a hospital, that we starting to require a bachelors for any supervisory position. Most nurse manager positions in the market require a minimum amount of business education in addition to a nursing degree. Director or above require an MBA or MHA plus a nursing degree.
I am sorry that it seems unfair, but I spend the last seven years in school while working in a salaried position. I work 60+ hours a week normally and am taking a full load of graduate classes. I have gotten some significant payraised, but it has been hard. One point, I was making the federally minimum salary for exempt, 23k. If you can't swing a night class or two while working, maybe you need to look at your lifestyle/career mix. My wife and I didn't go out and eat for two years so I could go back to school.
In God we trust, all others require data.
If you delay pleasure infinitely, the pleasure will be infinite. (YM)
I was fixing a computer in a high-level admin's office once...when I was finished I used the computer to log in to my trouble-ticket database to sign off on the job and pick up the next one. My database site started with www1.ticketetc.etc and this dope had auto-complete on in his browser, which happily dropped down www1.hotteenagesluts.etc, etc., etc. It would be pretty hard to mistake that for hotteenagesluts, Massachusetts. I didn't report that one, it was an accident that I saw it. Although it probably explained the problems with his computer.
I also once worked with a dude that would porn-surf at work, and his station was right next to the fridge where we all kept our lunches and drinks so it was impossible not to see it. He seemed to get a kick out of it, actually, making his co-workers look at his crap. I had to work on his computer once, and he had bookmarked hundreds of porn sites. I did finally report that dude, the manager "talked" to him. The surfer moved his computer into a little closet-type room and started going in to work at 4am so he could porn surf "in private." I didn't much like having his sleazy little porn-addled eyeballs on me at work, nor did I enjoy him walking around constantly at half-mast, I can tell you that.
That's too bad that in your situation you got stuck with bad people. I've seen that happen as well with highly educated individuals. I still feel that it's just a coincidence that the bad managers had less than a BS. I'm curious though and you may not know this but, is that normal for the medical industry. Most of my clients are public sector, schools, governments, etc. I understand about the necessities of an education. My wife has an MBA in accounting. That's why I never got around to getting my BS. Me I still stand by my statement that education does not equal ethics. You either have ethics or you don't.
Don't blame me for redundant posts. I can't type very fast. Hence the user ID.
It happens with highly educated people to. I think the significance is how much of a business background does a manager have when mixed with line experience/education. There are exceptions to the rule (Enron); however, out of all of our nursing directors, the ones with MBAs or MHAs tend to have better cost control and less cronies. They might still shaft you in a New York minute, but less likely to fly by the seat of their pants. Conversely, since I work with our Internal Audit personnel, I hear horror stories about people ignoring audit requests for information. The guy I am replacing decided he didn't have to explain his purchase procedure to audit, which was investigating his group for poor cost control and inventory management.
Healthcare suffers from two big areas, first being managers in support roles with no management education and second being clinicians heavily influencing senior management decisions being self-interested boobs. Many a physician will suggest an idea that royally screws a hospital because it benefits the physician. See Grady.
In God we trust, all others require data.
Won't both happen? After all, the tickets for off-broadway were 1/2 the price, and w/ a "multi-million dollars budgets" there's bound to be someone at the top who's running the show and making a nice bonus.
When was the last time a poor person signed your paycheck, anyway?
When you recognize love in another and realize how precious it is, everything else seems so insignificant.
I will agree, but add that at that point, "company" becomes "the wrong company to work for."
At my last place of employment, it was like that. Work 42.5 hours "salaried" and have to stay later than norm? That's ok. Have to leave early, or leave at a half-day? You got eye-daggers pointed at you from every direction. You were a traitor! I felt like I was the only one who had a life outside of work.
"Sure it's an ethical problem! That's why it's against the law."
Ethics and the law are two different things. Ethics and JUSTICE, you might have a point.
"Every time Congress passes a joke, it's a law ..."
Kevin Smith on Prince
I know what you mean.
I had to fix a computer like that one time. When it was time, I went out and bought a pair of yellow rubber gloves (normally for washing dishes) before touching the guys' keyboard and mouse. The boss said "Aren't you exaggerating a bit?" I said "You touch it then! I'll talk you through it."
The rubber gloves stayed on ...
The guy was a filthy pig, in the physical sense. Stay up all night clubbing, doing ecstacy, then come in, drench himself in aftershave to hide the smell, my eyes would water from 100 feet away ... I finally told him to stop with the cheap aftershave, he was using so much. He said it was something like $75/bottle. I told him to try 50 cents worth of municipal tap water and a nickel of soap for a change.
Kevin Smith on Prince
by law he must notify superiors and if there is a failure to notify the FBI the person to whom it was escalated can be prosecuted with aiding and abetting distribution of child pornography- it always amazes me that people don't know this but being someone that has worked in electronic discovery and with people's personal documents for the last 10 years this is something that was drilled into me years ago by employers because THEY don't want to be involved in a criminal suit.
porn- eh, you would be surprised how much porn is in people's company boxes- until the last couple of years when companies started filtering you couldn't really find a company without at least 1 or 2 custodians that have a store of porn, it is extremely common.
For sure. But in this case it's the fact that it's unethical that has caused the law to be brought about (as opposed to, say, campaign contributions). I'm not daft enough to be suggesting that there is always a link between legality and ethics. That would be silly.
Need to type accents and special characters in Windows? Use FrKeys
2. Someone looking at kiddie porn isn't an "ethical problem" either - its a legal problem! Like in "against the law".
That depends. It may not have really been "porn". Nudes of any age that are not explicit or sexually provocative are legal. That's why you can show a baby's ass in a diaper commercial. That's why Brooke Shields was allowed to be fully nude in "Pretty Baby" at around age 12.
It could have even been clothed children for all we know. People call ANYTHING porn if they think you can fap to it.
Gives them the ability to fire someone who violates the policy
Having read a list of grievances of a co-worker being 'let-go' it was about 30 items that everyone in the group was doing. Half of it not even official policy, just ethical non-prefessional attidute, like "talking more than 2.5 minutes near the cofee machine".
The business went belly up a year after that, proving they where cutting costs. What they needed was to bully employees into signing a agreement not to sue against a "severance bonus".
People call ANYTHING porn if they think you can fap to it.
True ... and by that definition, there's someone who is going fap fap fap while reading this post. Uggh! (I guess that's the CowboyNeal option for this thread :-)
Porn, like everything else, is in the mind of the beholder, and what a person considers purient or lascivious says a lot about who they are. (Of course, the people who scream the loudest against porn probably have the biggest collections ...)
Kevin Smith on Prince
We nerds are good with machines because we think like machines, therefore ethics are less important than function! ;-)
"I hope you like Guinness, Sir. I find it a refreshing substitute for, er... food." Col. Jack O'Neil, SG-1
Quoting me out of context and countering something I didn't say is foul play. So I think it is obvious...
You are not a monkey... People are born black.
"Instinct"? What discredited eugenics school (assuming it's not simply that you're bitter at not having gone to school) did you crawl out of? [copious amounts of bitter bullshit removed] People are born black. Some people are born gay. Again, no-one is born an IT professional. You have some serious issues of elitism. Perhaps it is because you cannot even pin down what your skills are - let alone how you achieved them - that you resort to describing your worth in terms of something you magically achieved in the womb. Do you know how silly that sounds?
The facts:
1) You are a bitter person
2) It has never been scientifically proven that people are "born gay"
3) People are born with natural abilities that can be honed. For instance, great logic and reasoning skills can be honed sharply and are key to having an "instinct" about computing. Some people are born large and strong and fast, and they become football players. People exploiting their natural gifts to make a living -- I AM SO SILLY!!! What you are doing here is arguing semantics, which is like, so third grade, dude.
I didn't really bother reading the rest of your nonsense... I obviously touched some nerve because you have a certification and are hypersensitive and probably have an inferiority complex. Your lack of a sound argument further bolsters my point about certifications and reasoning ability.
evil adrian
Yes, kiddie porn need to be banned, but only because producing it is an evil abuse of the children who appear in it. There's no real evidence that looking at porn that depicts evil behavior causes that behavior. If it did, there's be a rash of torture killings every time another Hostel sequel came out.
Lots of people have sexual fantasies that would have them thrown in prison or even lynched if they tried to act on them in real life. (Actually, I suspect all people do.) They don't act on them because they're wired to grasp that hurting people is wrong, or because they're not adept at the moral rationalization you need to be a criminal. People who aren't this way are criminals and possibly sociopaths, and you identify them by how they behave towards others, not by their taste in porn.
This attitude toward pedophilia has got to change. Yes, people who abuse children, sexually or otherwise, need to be punished. But this notion that we need to come down on everybody who even smells of pedophilia is stupid, cruel, and really just makes matters worse.
As I write this, California parole agents are going around telling hundreds of sexual offenders that they have to move, because they live too close to parks, schools, or other places that children congregate. Many of these offenders actually have no history of child abuse. All of them will have trouble finding new housing that complies with the rules. Those that don't will either have to go back to prison (at extreme expense to the taxpayers), start living on the street, or go underground. Yeah, that's an effective way to keep track of predators!
You said, and I quote word for word, "A lot of the IT professionals I've encountered that had certifications, it seemed to me, went through the motions to earn them, to prove that they knew something". Explain to me how context changes your meaning there, i.e. that the purpose of their certification was to show that they had greater knowledge than they might not otherwise have been able to show.
The fact that you later suggest some sort of correlation with lack of ability does not mean that earing a certification demonstrates anything negative - any more than walking through airport security while being a young Muslim male means something negative, even in the knowledge that a greater proportion of young Muslim men in the USA have been suicide bombers than, say, Asian grandmothers. Had you kept your mouth shut there, you could have at least been able to stand on a platform of "well, certification is entirely worthless" - but you said that the end of certification was to "prove that they knew something", meaning you've recognised that they're attempting to demonstrate their skill - and someone attempting to demonstrate a skill is a positive thing, no?
Context fallacies usually result from overly general intrinsic reasoning. My interpretation of your sentence, was, as demonstrated, the result of careful consideration of your wider argument. Your monkey/black racist unfunny is not an example of context fallacy, but simply making a false assumption (i.e. exposing a prejudice :-) that the reader associates "monkey" with "black".
I could write an essay making frequent references to both blacks and to monkeys, and only if some interpretation of an extract that would not be so interpreted if the whole essay was read could be used to infer that I made that association would a context fallacy occur. Understood?
Let me see.. 1 compsci degree, 2 mathematics degrees, IQ 156, business bringing in about $17k/month, living in C18 detached house on the outskirts of a peaceful seaside resort in the south of England.. no wife and no children, but I'm not looking for either, as I have way too much fun working and spend the few hours of spare time I get studying. But I do occasionally get stressed, and one of my stress-relieving exercises is a Firefox window where I poke and prod at those who need taking a notch down ;-).
Are you asserting that people are born without any features that cause someone to lean toward a particular sexual orientation?
If so, you might be interested to learn that most men try to hump women, and most women try to hump men. Which means that orientation - something determined at birth - pushes someone toward a particular orientation. Now, you suggest that no-one is "born gay". So nature must perfectly associate attraction of attractee with gender of attractor - but we know that's false from observation of various mammals. So why would it not also be false for humans? Now humans are sufficiently complex that some aspect of their development may modify their predisposition, but that's not denying the existence of a predisposition - we are talking about sexuality, here, not higher intellectual reasoning.
My argument fails if we believe that, even for the male rat, the choice to only bone other male rats is part of some deep psychological issue - but good luck countering the animal behaviourists on that.
One person in a million might be exceptionally stupid or exceptionally gifted in a particular area. Many more peo
Here, in Canada, the age of consent is 14.
Yet a depiction of a person under 18 in a sexual situation (or just naked) is "child pornography".
Ergo, at the age between 14 and 18:
1) He/she is competent enough to make the decision to screw but not to be photographed.
2) You can legally screw his/her brains out but $deity help you if you mention it in your diary.
Wonderful thing, logic.
Hmmm... Possession == purchase
Did anyone told RIAA?
Make that: /,/^$/p' < some_mbox | less
sed -n '/^From
geesh.
Your post was way too long, so I didn't read it. Do you have a user-friendly condensed version?
evil adrian