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US Firms Read Employee E-mail On a Massive Scale
An anonymous reader writes "In its fifth annual study of outbound e-mail and data loss prevention issues, Proofpoint found that 41% of the largest companies surveyed (those with 20,000 or more employees) reported that they employ staff to read or otherwise analyze the contents of outbound e-mail. 22% of these companies said they employ staff primarily or exclusively for this purpose."
I also monitor your web traffic, now get back to work!
No trees were harmed in the posting of this message. However, a great number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.
It may be just me, but I get really suspicious when a company in any business sponsors a survey and then uses the results to justify their own existence.
Mac OS X and Windows
Particularly for the Slashdot crowd? Hell, a portion of the readership is probably responsible for helping to implement such measures.
Don't use your work email for personal stuff. It was never a good idea, and it's becoming ever less of a good idea. Don't say anything in an email that you wouldn't say in person or in writing. Be professional.
Also, don't forward chain letters, don't send around forwards of kitten pictures, pr0n, jokes, political screeds, etc. etc. Most people don't want to get it and you're wasting bandwidth.
I hope people realize this is evidence of how reasonable it is for a company do monitor your e-mail rather than acting like they are being violated. You can't chat online with babes all day.
Whale
Where I'm at I'm lucky if I can get anybody at all to read my email. Especially my boss.
Wow. So those 'I read your email' T-shirts are for real then.
Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day. Set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I had a boss who told us when we started that everything we did at work would be monitored.
I didn't realize the extent of their monitoring! In the contract, it simply said 'all available facilities will be used to monitor employees while working'. I figured they'd check my email once in a while. They read emails, login/logout times, tracked employee positions (cameras in the office! A friend of mine was fired for taking breaks, when he went into his 'final' meeting, they showed him a time lapsed video of himself!) and recorded phone calls.
All this would come up only when they had a problem with your work - If you produced results, they didn't care what you did otherwise, but if you weren't getting sales, they found some other reason why you were doing poorly...
I spent 2 weeks skipping breaks and working through lunch trying to get a big (BIG!) contract and I was asked by my manager to do try to get this contract. I spent the rest of my time trying to make some money in the meantime... and I was brought into the office one day and they presented me with the emails I'd sent to my wife during those two weeks and told me that I was wasting company time. I told them they needed to look at the cameras to see I never left my desk, and to check the phone tapes for the last week to see that I was working hard. Turns out they only saved the conversations for a day or two...
I never got 'disciplined' for poor results after that.
It's that really big Company, AMERI CO. the one I have a lifetime contract with. When they check my emails, thats where I draw the line.
I would imagine that that breaks down to 100% running scanners against email and maybe looking at flagged messages and 0% routine reading of email.
Given the tedium of slogging through just my own email, you couldn't pay me to spend all day doing that for other people.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
All this does is prove that you can't trust people who work at big dumb companies. They can't tell you what they really think by email, so you have to assume they are lying to you. It's amazing that 41% of these companies admitted to the practice after the whole HP scandal.
problem solved.
wow, talk about a non-issue.
Gone!
Dear Sir
I would like to apply for the job of Chief Sneak and Tattle-tale at your company. I believe I have the relevant nosiness, curiousity and contempt for my fellow employees, along with an over-riding ability to toady to management. I also love lauding it over other people that I know their business.
This happens everywhere. Part of my duties at a Fortune 500 company was to restore old mail files from a few years back for numerous employees on a periodic basis. The auditors supposedly claimed it was part of SOX, and to prevent insider trading secrets and what-not.
I don't miss those days calling back tapes all the time. Smaller, private companies are so much better to work for. More common sense practices and less red tape B.S.
Until now I had no evidence my boss was actually reading my emails.
Hello,
I'm William Colgate II, an Executive Member of the Audit and Compensation Committee of ExxonMobil in London (http://www.exxonmobil.co.uk).
I have a sensitive and private brief from the Senior Executives of this top oil company in need of your partnership to re-profile funds amounting to US$12.2M (Twelve Million Two Hundred Thousand United States Dollars). I will let you have the details but in summary, the fund shall be paid to you through our operating bank where it is presently deposited as soon as the legalization and documentation process is concluded in your name.
This is a legitimate transaction without government interference and you shall be compensated with 20% of the total sum, should you and your company agree to work with us. If you are interested, please reply to palon9@terra.es for further details.
Warm Regards,
William Colgate II
+44 704 579 1413
If this is an example of email... I am not surprised that you should be interested in this topic.
Maybe your boss will find out why you lost the Cohen account.
Of course companies are going to monitor information being sent out over their internet connections. They would be crazy not to. Want privacy? Email on your own time and your own dime.
Power does not corrupt - power attracts the corrupt.
Nice try, but that software will never make it past Sarbanes-Oxley. Besides, every company worth its stock price uses Lotus Notes anyway.
What they didn't mention in this is how many of the companies with more thank 20,000 are legally *required* to monitor e-mail. In the financial services sector it is very common to have dedicated staff to perform this function. I would have loved to have seen that number but I can understand why they didn't include it in the interest of cramming a few more ads on that page.....
Hi Angy,
I'll be late home, but its OK I'll stop and get a take-away. Please reply and let me know if you want Chinese or Indian.
(Well I won't have to email)
Unless the government is one of the involved firms, you have no expectation of privacy in the job place. This can be easily testified to by looking around and seeing security cameras everywhere in your place of employment.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
At work it's ok to chat with friends, in moderation, as long at the work gets done.
Even with that policy though, when I chat with my wife or friends when I'm at work, I use Off The Record to encrypt my conversations.
It helps that my wife and brother Adium which already had it installed, and that I use a Linux at work which has packages in the repository.
And when I do send emails from work it's from Gmail, and always with https.
I figure that the work email is for work stuff, and they can monitor their business stuff all they want. For my personal stuff, it's personal and I'm not going to give them the chance.
https://www.facebook.com/digitizeicm -- Show your support for the digitization of the Iron County Miner newspaper archiv
Some countries, like Canada, treat email like paper mail, and you need a court order to read an employee's email. If you can't trust someone, don't employ them!
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
Our company has had to set up some email filtering and archiving. Why?
A receptionist for our company was fired for sending out bulk pornographic email, including video. He has done it for months. He's suing us, because he claims he was fired because he is gay. We only have a few of those emails that he send on backup because our backup only goes so far, will it be enough to not have to pay him big bucks and rehire him?
An accountant was fired for gross incompetance. She fouled up our main systems, needed her password reset with the Feds at $100 a pop several times a month, etc. Finally, she comes in and demands to work 30 hours but still get 40 hours pay. She was fired after a public tantrum. She is suing us, because she is black and claims racial discrimination. We need a LOT of documentation to back up our claims that she wasn't a good employee, because she can just say we don't have enough black people, and that can be considered proof of discrimination by itself.
We are heavily regulated about customer information. If someone emails out another persons personal information outside the company, and it makes the news, we all suffer. We have to monitor for that too.
We have to take preventative measures to block bad language from coming in and going out. We can get sued because an employee called a customer a f*cker in an email, or because someone saw a dirty joke on someone else's screen (sexual harassment).
Laws were written up to protect the "little guy", so now we have to prove to government agencies that we have made accurate hiring and firing decisions. We have to support our claims, and take preventive action, because there are so many ways that we can get screwed by employees I can't even count them.
This week we had to let someone go because they came up short by $750. We had two people dedicated to figuring out what happened for two days. We spent a lot on money and time, and we are looking forward to the inevitable lawsuit. We have email to back it all up, and because of procedures we have in place, the emails are professional and straightforward, instead of causal and possibly derogatory. It took us a while to get here, but yes, this is what you asked for. By increasing our risk through lawsuits and regulatory compliance, we have to manage that risk by monitoring our employees.
Go swear to your friends at home.
... to be an American. I think you guys gave up way too many rights in the past few years. (This is not meant to be a flaimbait).
Ok, so under certain circumstances & organizations I agree that having others read your email regularly could be justified, but that would be like 1 out of 1000 companies at most. Also, who's reading the email of the person who reads your emails? Unless you work for the NSA, FBI, etc, this kind of behaviour does not breed positive morale or a relaxed work environment, nevermind that you have next to zero privacy.
Unfortunately, technology is making it easier and faster for companies to adopt this kind of behaviour. I agree that employers need to make sure that employees aren't wasting a lot of company time and resources doing innapropriate things. But emailing your mother or wife that you are meeting them at 6pm after work at whatever coffee shop, or calling them for this same purpose is just a part of life, as is work. Don't you talk about what time you are going to work on your own personal non-work time with these same people? Well, then wtf is the difference? I think spending 10 minutes a day on personal calls or emails should be allowed. Why can't I call my daughter every other day to see how she is doing? I'm not going to be very productive at work if in the back of my mind I'm worried about the safety and well being of my daughter as she walks home from school at 3pm.
And if 10 minutes really is so detremental to my company, then hell, let me work an extra 10 minutes each day, but for #()$* sakes, give me the freedom to stay in touch with my loved ones!
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
....que nadie entendeis cuando escribes asi;
Especialmente cuando deja a deletrear palabras correctamente asi que no traducen.
throw new NoSignatureException();
How can employees be expected to tolerate this denial of their personal freedoms?!
No, I think they just over-did your circumcision.
Who watches the e-mails of the people who watch the e-mails...
Where I'm at I'm lucky if I can get anybody at all to read my email. Especially my boss.
Wow, ain't that the truth. A lot of people where I work have resorted to trying to cram important messages into the subject line in the hopes that the dolts up the greasy pole might at least scan their in-boxes looking for their latest opportunity to kiss some ass above them (you know - important stuff like golfing with a VP or something) and accidentally read something that matters.
Any company that feels the need to monitor their employees that closely without a really compelling need is not going to last long. (I define compelling need as something on the order of national security, building weapons systems, guarding highly valuable financial assets, or similar activities) If they can't ask you for results and trust you to go get them, that isn't a working relationship that is going to be productive.
1) Work for companies with over worked and under-budged IT departments who fight fires daily and have no long term plans - These companies are highly likely not to have any time to be reading your emails. Hell, you'd be lucky if the mail server stays up all week.
2) Write emails in foreign languages. In North America this works well, where so many people only speak English. Alternatively, teach your loved ones to use encryption in emails.
3) Use a fax machine. I know, waste of paper, but most companies don't have technology implemented to sniff/wiretap fax transmissions.
4) RDP to your home PC and write an email from there to your loved ones.
5) Make calls from conference rooms instead of your desk. This won't work if you call people daily, but its good if you need to make personal calls once a week or so. At the very least, it won't show up on your phone's call log, or the PBX's log about your phone.
6)If none of these are an option, you are working for a company that doesn't respect your privacy. Stand up for yourself, and go find another job.
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
Would you not do such monitoring if you had a babysitter or any other house help? Do you want it illegalized/regulated? Oh, maybe, not you personally, but would you consider it unreasonable? Surveillance camera-systems are hot items at the electronics stores with multiple systems available from different vendors (most hubs run Linux, BTW)...
Point is, we are all employers to some extent or another. Don't ask for bogus regulation — it will come back and bite you or someone else you did not mean to affect, even if your intent was to hurt only the most "corporationy" of the corporations...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I always told my employees that as long as they got their work done with good quality and on time, we would get along just fine. If they abused that trust they might get a warning but only once. And you know what? It worked. I've had very little turnover and high morale and my employees really worked hard. Sending a few innocuous emails to a significant other doesn't qualify as a breach of trust. Looking at porn in the workplace would be a firing offense. It's really all about what is reasonable.
the keylogger on your work box?
Best Slashdot Co
Now see here, the Aryan White Idaho Benevolent Society does NOT read its employee email, and this is NOT an example.
reading the posts here definitely reminds me of numerous scenes from the 1985 movie, Brazil...
And opening themselves up for privacy lawsuits. Hmmm... get an email from a parent concerned about health issue X you are experiencing (unbeknownst to your employer). Employer finds out and terminates employee or boss uses it for leverage for extra work/projects. According to Mark Rasch from SecurityFocus.com, it's not as clear cut as one might think. Varying laws in the USA from State to State make the issue even more challenging. From Mark: "In many states, the same law that prohibits the interception or recording of telephone calls also prohibits the interception or recording of electronic communications without the consent of all parties."(Reference: http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/412).
Talk about a confusing issue. You require outright consent from employees AND the party your emailing. Period. No exceptions. Simply stating 'we monitor all emails' will not hold up in court - should it ever come to it - you need permission from that individual employee - or all employees and have a readily available record of their consent.
If what I'm reading is correct, its far easier to leave your emails alone, and then search if you have an issue with court permission, than it is to be actively reading emails.
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. - Peter F. Drucker
Want to fire someone? You damn well better have thorough documentation about how they were not a good employee and were breaking company policy since it's VERY common for dismissed employees to sue for wrongful dismissal - especially minorities. But I hear you saying "at will employment". Doesn't matter, they'll sue anyway and it will cost the company a lot of time and money. Sometimes these lawsuits are justified, often they aren't but the end result is that EVERY company can and should take measures to document the behavior of their employees to protect themselves.
Doesn't mean the company has to go overboard but retaining and occasionally reading emails or filtering to protect the company is reasonable. Keeping records of phone conversations is reasonable to a point (some industries like financial services often require it by law) especially for customer facing employees. A few minutes of checking in on the family should not be a big deal in most cases. Spending any amount of time surfing for porn is a big deal. Emailing confidential company info to an unauthorized individual is a VERY big deal. Etc. There is no one size fits all answer but management absolutely can and should keep an eye on things to protect the company, the jobs of the employees and the investment of the shareholders.
I work for a large (300,000+ mailboxes) company in the financial industry. I happen to work in the electronic communications group as a systems architect and my specific area of expertise is the design and implementation of systems that monitor email and IM conversations of employees. At a high level there are two major reasons we have systems in place that monitor these types of communications:
1) Because my company is a SEC & NASD registered company we are *required* by law to both actively monitor (in some instances we stop emails mid stream and hold them in a queue until a reviewer approves them) and archive all email/IMs of all employees who carry a license with those organizations. To not do so would be considered criminal activity and we would incur huge fines (hundreds of millions of dollars). We've been fined before; those fines were creatively structured to require that we invest XXX millions of dollars into systems that allow us to meet the requirements. A very basic example of the type of thing we monitor for are indications of insider trading. More than one broker has been let go after being caught trading unethically.
2) The second major reason we monitor electronic communications is to limit the liability of the company by halting the distribution (usually unintended) of non-public information... also known as NPI. A basic example of the types of things we monitor for are things that impact the financial well being of our customers (both people and business customers) such as account numbers, SSNs, passwords, insider company information, etc. Everyone who works at my company is subject to this second type of monitoring.
Naturally having these systems in place opens those who are being monitored to having their communications scrutinized for other types of violations... namely violations of corporate policy. i.e. use of profanity or other behavior deemed inappropriate and not considered behavior that is acceptable as representative of the corporation's image. We do actively scan for these types of issues, but generally just file the information away in case it triggers a customer complaint or is identified as repetitive and needs to be addressed by a person's manager.
I don't want to discuss the products we're using today because that is proprietary information, but I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt what direction the monitoring industry is going. There are already a handful of companies who can actively monitor data using a common set of rules/policies at ever layer of the infrastructure. There's a company called Orchestria, for example and who we have been talking to recently, who through a centralized policy engine can monitor literally everything you do on your computer through agents installed on the desktop, agents installed on IM gateways, agents installed on mail servers, agents installed on proxy servers and a border agent appliance that ideally sits in the DMZ that will perform packet level scanning and can block literally anything that it can read from those packets... going as far as to block encrypted data or brute force hack encrypted data on the fly and hold it in queue until it is scanned.
Scary right?
It depends on who you are I guess. As a technical person and admitted nerd I think that's cool as hell. It's the conspiracy theorist in me who is scared.
This is common knowledge. People expect to be monitored at work. As long as this or any other stuff doesn't come in the way of my work I don't really care.
The thing is control freakery is random in corporate workplaces because everyone wants to feel important and justify their existence so trivial things get elevated to the level of security threats etc. The bottom line is any policy that penalises 90% of people to account for 10% is always negative for the company because in any scenario or group of people 5-10% are going to be inefficient, incompetent, slackers etc but trying to control them is ultimately counterproductive because it leaves the 90% worse off. Security paranoia is important for perhaps 10% of companies, the other 90% depends on the culture of the company.
I work for a large global multinational and we don't have even half the level of things we read about in slashdot. IT may have ideas but the priority is to provide a more conducive environment for employees so they can work better. Because of corporate governance legislation like sox and other things they are policies in place but management is not paranoid and is focussed on what we do to make money. If you can't trust your employees and make them feel trustworthy you are always going to perform at lower level.
A friend of mine at some big name bank sent me some intersting e-mails about the possibility of said big name bank being taken over by other big name bank.
Interestingly he's been blocked from sending e-mails now but can still receive them!
Install your own smtp on your home adsl, or something. Put it on port .. lets say, 7856.
Tunnel that via SSH, or something else.
Problem solved. l;)
Well, the companies keep telling us "don't expect a job for life" and now we don't, they realise that means looking for a new (better) job is a long-term continual process and NOW they don't like it.
shut up idiot and go read some history books instead of making stuff up(i said making not blowing!!!)
as for company monitoring,
its the old one,
your boss only notices when you do something wrong, eg your 30mins early for work and leave 30mins late - nothing is said, 5mins late and all the paperwork comes out. is it a matter of time before they wont let you go home mon-fri, what if you spoke to someone and offended them? or told a partner a company secret - whats next usb mind readers, if you think certain stuff security comes and escorts you from the building after of course wiping your mind.
they hire you, not some drone
Give me just one port, to one machine on the outside which I control, and I'll proxy everything through there... mostly using it to surf the job sites and mail out resumes to companies without this sort of policy. If a company's priorities include dedicating staff to reading employee email on a routine basis, I don't want to work there.
How is this different from Google reading, indexing and tagging every word in your e-mails? Is it bad just because they actually hire people instead of using an AI?
I work in a smaller business (one of those shops where I'm the only only doing both the email administration and pretty much all the other computer-related stuff). What I tend to see is employees *receiving* non work-related material, not so much SENDING it.
Some employees don't even have a home computer with Internet access, so all their friends start sending their "funny photos", jokes, and so forth to the only contact address they can find for the person - the work email.
You *could* "blacklist" those people from sending you things, but come on! These are the employee's friends or relatives. They really don't want to block everything they might send them, because sometimes it's relevant or useful.
I don't know about bandwidth, but in my office, we're often asked to archive our email because we're running out of space on the Rackspace server.
Seems like that would happen a lot less often if I didn't get cute kitten pictures and "inspiring" powerpoint files forwarded to me all the time.
You're tired of Jews? Well, I'm tired of that dude who always steals the best pieces of poop out of public restrooms and keeps them all to himself (he posts here to Slashdot more than you'd expect). (About as much as you do, apparently).
And why is it that people motivated by irrational hatred and coprophilia always seem to post first?
Look at the contrast. On libertarian and privacy issues the slashdot crowd are the first to pounce on any policy and become paranoid. But when it come to their own little fiefdoms they are not ashamed to run a goebbels type operation with pride.
Of course IT admins don't make policy or decide what is 'crap' and what IT infrastructure should be used for. These are management decisions, please tell me what policies IT admins implement unilaterally without sneaking up to some management type and appraising them of some exaggerated thread to curtail some liberty and get that much craved pat on the back.
The problems is control freakery and self importance is a human frailty and good management won't let this unfortunate weakness derail their organizations. Of course some companies need to be extra cautious of security but those will barely number 10% and there is a way to do it sensibly without running a prison type environment. The rest of them its very much a cultural issue and how paranoid and immature the management is.
For self important IT admins whining on this thread the network doesn't belong to you nor does the infrastructure, its purpose to refresh to your memory is to facilitate employees worklife.
in several industries, especially the financial industries. Programs are written specifically to monitor outbound communications to make sure that brokers are making fraudulent promises, etc...
IIRC, the Supreme Court settled this law years ago. Corporate email is the corporations, and they may do with it as they wish. Want your communications to be more private? Use a wireless device that you pay for. It isn't a guarantee of privacy, but it will avoid the corporate network sniffers.
I agree with much of what you're saying. But I'd also point out that email *filtering* and *archiving* are two vastly different things.
It seems to me that practically all of the issues you're bringing up could be handled successfully by retaining good email backups, going back for a reasonable length of time?
Our company doesn't do anything special in the way of attempting to read employee's emails or filter their content. But we DO have backup systems that dump copies of all the mailboxes onto nightly backups, and we keep a couple alternating "month end" tapes, plus a "year end" tape that's archived away.
This way, if something actually comes up, there's a decent amount of supporting email evidence that can be retrieved for that specific situation.
Otherwise, employees have a general expectation that nobody's monitoring their daily email correspondence in a "big brother" fashion.
Employers already have the legal right to read all of your email simply because you are using THEIR equipment to send it. They are effectively your ISP.
There is NOTHING legally that can stop an employer from reading your email except for a contract signed by them that says they won't do so, in which case even then it is merely a contract violation, or another law that expressly makes the emails privileged in some manner.
Everyone has omnipotent search and snoop authority over their own machines when it comes to email, employer or not. It's part of the propriety that comes with OWNING it.
This is why I run all my casual surfing and personal email traffic through a secure(SSH) proxy on my home box.
Google may parse messages, but Google offers HTTPS. If you're at work sending e-mail and you should use encryption.
Yahoo and Hotmail do not offer HTTPS.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
I get that, it's understandable up to a point. But you could also tell them about things like hotmail, yahoo, or gmail. They're free and accessible from more or less anywhere.
What I still don't get is why things like web surfing etc. are necessarily always seen as bad by companies.
...
... Here's a hint: corporate culture and motivation
:-) Google pretty much has a dot bomb culture. I think the spectacular success of one instance of a dot bomb culture is distracting you from the many failures. It is premature to say that Google's success is due to anything beyond a brilliant idea at the right time combined with rich angel investors. Their initial success and its continued dividends allows them to afford many inefficiencies, perhaps many elements of their cultures fit into this area. Keep in mind that success can hide inefficiency and that the true causes of success are sometimes erroneously attributed.
Note that the original poster wrote 'I stopped "special" surfing at the office'. There is a pretty high probability that this is referring to porn. Tolerating employees visiting porn sites is one way a company can get sued. Of course while the solution described in this article is cool and amusing, it is probably another way to get a company sued.
Ever wonder why Google is so successful?
Inertia mostly. They had a brilliant idea a while ago and have refined it since then to maintain competitiveness. Google has done many cool things since then but they are mostly a drain on success or neutral, some mild successes, but no big successes outside the original domain. Also, it is doubtful Google allows employees to browse porn sites either. With their deep pockets their fears regarding law suits are going to be pretty high.
Clue: "Law of Small Numbers", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasty_generalization.
Now at least one element of Google culture, allowing employees the time to work on pet projects that many benefit the company, may have a proven track record. 3M allowed this for decades and many useful products emerged. Google may follow 3M's lead, but it is a little early to pass judgement.
Also keep in mind that Google offers several services that operate on HTTPS: Google Reader (great for bypassing those stupid web-filters that block political sites at repressive companies), Google Calendar (so you can schedule your interviews without alerting your company), and Google Docs (so you can work on your resume in private).
Google is also a godsend for consultants at client sites who are working with sensitive materials they don't want their clients to see (and don't want to use VPN).
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
. . . wouldn't know how to do that.
What?
Correspondence from your work e-mail is no different from paper mail on company letterhead. The company owns what has its name on it and what's composed on company time.
But some companies might be better off putting that kind of effort into quality control on the *products* they send out, rather than correspondence.
I would love to see a list of the companies that are involved in this practice. I wonder if my company is one of them? Not that I send out unscrupulous emails, but my curiosity has been piqued.
'mmmmmmmmm.... forbidden donut'
No bots, just luck.
Every once in a while I reload slashdot to find that there is an article with no comments on it.
This morning I woke up, pulled out my laptop while laying in bed, and realized that there was a first post opportunity.
I thought of what I wanted to say after seeing my first post opportunity and let loose another one of my signature first posts.
I noticed that Jews are hating on a certain presidential candidate for not fully backing their murderous agenda of land and water theft by way of genocide.
You people may not like to hear it, but Jews prove every day that they are a murderous, conniving, and theiving people.
They steal land and water from Palestinians. They demolish houses not built with Jewish permits. In typical Jewish fashion they refuse to issue permits to build. This while Jews water their lawns with Palestinian water.
Jews are a menace to everyone around them, and Israel proves this fact every single day.
I'm not advocating wide-open porn surfing at work (even though I'm a peddler myself), but I hope you can explain how someone can get (realistically) sued because their employee surfed porn. I'm dying of curiosity here.
An employee could be fired, sure, but sued ? Where's the victim ?
This is a battle that will go on until cloning supplants natural reproduction, but I think people need to re-learn that naked things are NOT evil. Japanese women licking toads and puking in their own shit, that's evil.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I knew it! *You're* the poo-hoarder! Well, I for one prefer your poop-thieving first-posts. Those at least make sense. You're really losing your touch, First-Post-Guy. Don't lose your coprophiliac base with this blah-blah-blah-tedious nonsense about Jews!
But you're correct, only the truly paranoid will put a keylogger on. Most employers will just fire you.
Best Slashdot Co
If somebody sues for sexual harassment, etc, porn surfing in the office would be used as red flag evidence that the company tolerated or facilitated a hostile work environment for women.
I hope you can explain how someone can get (realistically) sued because their employee surfed porn. I'm dying of curiosity here.
;-) Things visible to coworkers or visitors, even "tame" bikini calendars, can create a "hostile workplace". It is largely a judgment call by the "victim". If he/she says they were uncomfortable, made a report to management, and management failed to take action the company can be sued and more importantly may in fact lose.
You have obviously never had any corporate sexual harassment training.
Which email are they reading? Personal accounts or work email? ('Tis a dumb question, but I'm curious.)
Not just inertia.
By hiring the best, they also prevent those people from joining the competition.
They are using a very effective method of hurting the competition. Just remember the flying chair.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
Well, they could have their B-5 PSI Corps: Porn-Sleuthing-Infomatics. They would be hired specially, and they would work in a "dungeon", protected by humans, multiple-access security doors, and lasers.
Now, anyone issuing or initiating a suit is disgruntled, burned-out ex-employee.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
work place?
Ask the Village People... "IN the NAVY!"
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Here's how to find that asshole out:
- Put your car in a viewable area, but preferably semi-secured
- attach RF or microwave devices to a microphone
- when the tyres are slit, the mic triggers the gates to close
the asshole is trapped.
Alternatively, mount dye sprayers under the wheel well, and when the mic detects a library sound of knife-slitting, the trigger pumps florescent dye on the fucker.
If you REALLY want to nail that fucker, put a sonic gun on your car somewhere, and when they slit the tire, and the mic detects it, the sonic device hits them with nausea-inducing waves. well, that assumes you don't need a US-DOD permit to obtain such a device or that you don't need FCC permission or a county health permit to activate such a device.
The asshole who wants to surf PORN on company time should get a pricey phone or an i-Phone for that. Addictive, non-damaging surfing is ONE thing. It's a disciplinary matter. PORN surfing, OTOH, can cause MULTIPLE "victimised" co-workers to sue and cost EVERYBODY their job. Selfish prick you have for a co-worker.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
No way!
Where's the "film-at-eleven" tag?
I'd like to lodge a complaint with the management regarding the poor quality of the parent post.
Dude, I totally *know*.
If you add up all the people who chose to strap themselves with explosives and then blow those same explosives up in order to kill Jews, and then also those people who died when a cheap-ass ballistic rocket they were trying to launch to kill Jews, instead blew up in their faces and killed them, and also the people who chose to try to kill Jews more directly with guns and stuff, but then ended up being shot or blown up by that damn Jew military...
Those Jews are just *butchers*! If they would just freaking *die* when people try to kill them, then there would be no suffering in the Middle East!
I like your style.
I like your style, too!
Later,
baboo_jackal
P.S.: I'm not the poop-thieving first-posts guy
Really? Well, those posts are really similar to what you've been saying in *this* thread. Huh. Well, rest-assured that the things you've so far had to say are at least as amusing to read as your prior accounts of eating shit out of public toilets.
The /. community, with all its expertise should write a bot which would make the first post with smart analysis of the story :/. Can somebody do that, I don't have time.
Plaintext attack: "Adium." Better assign him a one-time pad of pseudonyms.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
You're right. I've only had very superficial harassment training. Maybe that's because I've worked with with sex industry for over a decade... ;)
Sexual harassment in my world is something we resolve internally, without the need for lawyers. There are rather clear lines that are never to be crossed, and the unspoken threat of boundless punishment is enough to keep most people in check.
The fact that I'm a wacko libertarian probably doesn't help me. While I consider bimbo wallpapers and calendars unprofessional in an office setting, I don't think the response to seeing a bikini babe should be a lawsuit. The person can certainly be asked (and required) to remove the content, but I refuse to buy into the idea that the viewer is hurt or damaged. After all, they see themselves naked (hopefully) every day in the shower, and I'd bet 100 to 1 they're uglier than whatever "damaged" their eyes.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Checking Stock Quotes is a much higher distraction than Pornography. People groundhogging over a cubicle seeing Sasha engulfing a pole even a horse would envy would immediately alienate you from ever working in your current job.
On the other hand, countless hours about fantasizing what you'll buy because your company's stock is doing well is so common you'd think people only work in Startups hoping to get bought for stock bonuses and later sippin' Rum on some beach in the Mediterranean. Nah! That nevvvver happens.