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NASA Employee Suspended For Blogging At Work
BobJacobsen writes "FCW has an article about a NASA employee that was suspended for blogging on government time. Seems the unnamed employee's 'politically partisan' blog entries were a violation of the Hatch Act. The article ends with a chilling quote from the government's Special Counsel in the case: 'Today, modern office technology multiplies the opportunities for employees to abuse their positions and — as in this serious case — to be penalized, even removed from their job, with just a few clicks of a mouse.'" Thing is, he was soliciting campaign donations and writing partisan stuff.
Sounds fair to me. Anyone who wastes time at work posting on internet sites should really expe... shit the boss is coming.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Honestly, the employee knew he was breaking the rules and if he was writing partisan stuff, I don't want to say he deserved it, but he knew what he was doing.
Then he should have had a little discipline and waited till he was home.
how do you blog with "just a few clicks of a mouse?"
Perhaps the Special Counsel should be fired for "being a total idiot."
I have to be mindful of when I am at work shouldn't this apply to everyone else?
many (maybe most) people would be disciplined for doing ANY blogging on company time. why should government workers be held to a lower standard?
...as long as he was campaigning for the other guy.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Since I didn't know about this Act, I searched and found:
This nice writeup. Bottom line is, this guy's a federal employee soliciting funds and pushing a political agenda on work time.
This of course has nothing to do with blogging, as you could replace "blogging" with "making phone calls" or "mailing letters" or "stalking people at the coffee maker".
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
Well, how I feel depends on what political bias the employee had.
If the employee's views agree with mine, then they are jackbooted fascist thugs for suspending him.
If I disagree with those views, then the employee has every right to deal with this inappropriate use of paid time.
Yeah, if you get caught using company computers to do personal business like that, of course you're going to get nailed. That is true in most private sector companies, and especially true in government agencies where the rules are even stricter. There's no story worth reporting here. Guy did something wrong, and he paid the price. Period. Move along, citizens...
Zooperman
Are very hard to lose, unless you break a few simple rules, like using govt. property for personal reasons, or blogging about politics.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
There are programs that write sports articles. There's only so many ways to write a short article relating the results of an athletic contest, so newspapers have programs that do it.
Can't imagine it would be too difficult for a NASA engineer to write a program that automates political blogging to the point that you can get a new post out with a few clicks. Especially considering the 'quality' of some of the blogs out there....
paintball
Ideally, the State should be above Politics. However, its somewhat impossible to expect that the people who work within the State will not have political leanings and agenda.
That said, whatever political activism people want to take part in should use their own time and their own equipment -- unless their job IS political activism. TFA doesn't say what this guy's job is, but I seriously doubt it"s "chief nasa suck-up to potential future presidents."
If he's using NASA equipment, NASA time, and identifying himself as a NASA employee, then he's basically creating a situation in which causual observers might be forgiven for assuming that NASA is endorsing "candidate x"
Quite frankly, it doesn't make sense for a department, which is often the subject of political punches, to want to be seen as interested - because if "their guy" lost, then the other guy will take it out on them.
Sucks for this guy, but if you work at NASA you should be smart enough to know better.
People have been fired for not doing what they were supposed to do. People can get fired by solving crosswords all day and do nothing else.
There often however is an unfair difference between surfing Playboy and reading the Playboy magazine during the office hours. One is easier to detect and prove then the other. It will be used often as an excuse to fire people, because prove is so much easier to get.
At least In Belgium you need a valid reason before you fire somebody without having to pay weeks or months salary, so they will need this proof. People drinking coffee and having cigarette breaks all the time are much less likely to get fired on the spot.
It has to be said that many companies in Belgium will do the firing of people in several steps. Vocal warning, 2 or thre written warnings, firing the person.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I know the folks who maintain our work's various policies and get brought in when discussing the computer-related ones. Typically policies are in place so that when a person's behavior (in person or online) get out of hand, they can point to a policy and say "you need to change or you'll be let go".
One specific to blogging appeared, with the usual wording about appropriate use of our company's name and so on (I think they wanted public affairs involved any time the name was mentioned in a blog). I came up with a list of obvious problems it raised, there was an outbreak of common sense, and all blogging language was removed.
Personally I feel that policies shouldn't be specific to online behavior if at all possible. Instead it's best to remain neutral to the form of communication and shape policies around it. For example, if we have a policy against hate speech, I wouldn't want to see employees writing hate speech on their blogs while they're at work (we let employees get online during breaks as long as it doesn't interfere with their work). What they do with their own time at home, of course, should generally be their own business.
A more important issue is what this says about the bloat and inefficiency at NASA. If an employee can spend years working on their blog at work, it is because they are not being given enough real work to do.
As seen on bash.org:
<Ben174> : If they only realized 90% of the overtime they pay me is only cause i like staying here playing with Kazaa when the bandwidth picks up after hours.
<ChrisLMB> : If any of my employees did that they'd be fired instantly.
<Ben174> : Where u work?
<ChrisLMB> : I'm the CTO at LowerMyBills.com
*** Ben174 (BenWright@TeraPro33-41.LowerMyBills.com) Quit (Leaving)
No surprise here. First, taking time out off your job to do personal business -- blogging or anything else -- is a fine way to get in trouble with your employer. Just common sense. You'd get in trouble for taking an hour every day at 3 o'clock to go running.
Second, the Hatch Act has, for decades, prohibited partisan political activity by federal employees. There's good reason, if only because those employees make decisions every day about how and where to spend taxpayer money.
Third, the provisions of the Hatch Act are made clear to every federal employee when they accept the job.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
They give you enough notification when you start your job that you can not use work time to basically influence partisan political activities, particularly raising funds. There are a ton of restrictions for what you do while not on duty as well. But above all, as others have said, he used work time to perform non-work related activities, so the fact that it was Internet or even politically related is irrelevant.
Well, folks, it's happening again! The
( ) New York Times
( ) LA Times
( ) Washington Post
is reporting that the government
( ) is censoring scientists with unpleasant news.
( ) is going to cut back program _________.
( ) has been engaging in warrantless wiretapping.
( ) wants to raise taxes.
( ) plans to institute new product regulations
This is just another case of
( ) Big Government ramming itself down our throats!
( ) the War on Science!
( ) how conservatives are killing the safety net!
( ) government punishing anyone productive!
( ) how the country's becoming a totalitarian dictatorship!
HT:
( ) Digg
( ) Slashdot
( ) Technorati
( ) The other blogger who's a carbon copy of me
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
Realistically the Hatch Act is often used by bosses who want to cut dead weight *or weight they don't like*. If your in good with the boss and your views mix with his, then happy blogging.
;)
I would have no issue with this, if the rules were applied evenly across everyone. The reality is that it isn't. Just like many other Acts and Rules it is simply applied as a tool by higher ups to get what they want.
Should the guy have gotten busted, YES! He broke the rules. I don't disagree with that. Is the rules being applied evenly across the line... Left and Right... Upper Management and Lower Peons? Nope.
I would love to know what side this guy was on. If he was working Elephant or Donkey. Maybe someone knows? *Not that matters either way. Both Republicans and Democrats can be dickheads when they want to*
headline... evar. How about this instead: NASA Employee Suspended for Violating Hatch Act
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
There was one fellow, well known back then, who deliberately tried to get people he didn't agree with shut up by emailing the sites near the end of their posting path and asking "innocent" questions about whether the company had filed the cost of their Usenet connections as campaign contributions. Given that Usenet at this time was still pretty underground, often run by network admins on spare machines, this had the potential for causing a lot of fuss and of course completely blew the unwritten "Usenet stays on Usenet" rule out of the water. He was completely dumbfounded by the response he got and went on a years-long campaign against the evil Usenet cabal who were allegedly trying to shut HIM up. I don't know if he ever understood what the problem was.
It is critical that the Civil Service function between changes in administration. If a new President came in and fired everyone to give overpaid jobs to the "friends and family plan" for the party and his supporters, you'd have a completely inept government, instead of our mostly inept one.
These days, we take for granted that the Civil Servants are employees doing a job, not appointees serving as the pleasure of the President, but understand how difficult it was to arrive there. Until Social Security and the SSA, and the IRS and it's paperwork, people didn't have "careers" the way we do now, you showed up, worked, got paid at the end of the day/week depending on the type of employee.
Right now, we don't have masses of Civil Servants doing political work or losing their job. The Hatch Act was part of creating that environment. The "excesses of it," obviously someone blogging on their lunch hour doesn't seem to be what was envisioned when they wanted to stop party bosses from filling a government secretarial pool with their cronies and cranking out letters from there, seem draconian. However, the alternative was real... and not useful to have good government.
The President is a political person, elected through politics, answerable only to political process, so of course he can engage in partisan process. The purpose of the Hatch Act (and similar legislation) was to depoliticize the Civil Servants.
While we joke about government employees being "lazy, incompetent, over/under paid, whatever," without a professional Civil Servants class it becomes a cesspool of corruption. As the public employees are normally unionized with a union that can both fight management (as a union) and change management (as a political organization), they are generally well paid and compensated, particularly with pension benefits and other back end benefits that politicians can approve and leave someone else with the bill. As a result, those jobs are potentially very desirable.
If you don't keep the political bosses away, watch how quickly jobs go to politically connected people that don't show up to work... It seems unlikely that someone powerful would care about a 30k - 90k/year job, but what if they could get it for their daughter-in-law that doesn't work, and just funnel money and benefits to their kids. That's how these positions work in countries without extensive controls, and why we have so many to keep the "friends and family plan" out.
Look at any community non profit and look at how many incompetent people hold well paying jobs because someone that gives money is friends with their parents/grandparents... corruption happens everywhere, and this attempts to reduce it. It doesn't attempt to remove partisanship from politics.
No twitter, there is no "wrong party", this is the Hatch Act. Go. Read. A. Book.
That's true, but it's hilarious coming from the top "use GNU/Everything or die" evangelist on the internets.
blah blah, please mod me up, I'm with groupthink
It's also easy to follow the laws that apply to civil servants, which I assume they were informed about when they were first hired. Wanna work for the government? Sure, just don't try to get the one you favour elected (or the other ones kicked out of office). Simple, no?
Somehow I just knew you were going to jump in here to cry censorship and trot out the Republikkan conspiracy to keep you and yours down. Don't you at least read the 150+ comments that were posted before yours to get a feel for what's happening?
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Nice attitude, there, eh?
Perhaps you failed to actually read what I said before deciding it was worth replying with such profanity. I rather specifically said that I was talking about stuff *NOT* done on government time and equipment. From other posts, it seems like we were being held to the pre-1993 rules; I don't know why. Of course, about 20 years of my time was pre-1993, so that would have made "sense" then.
You also apparently have trouble with English comprehension in that I rather explicitly referred to the "ethics" training in general, rather than solely to the Hatch act stuff, which was just one part. For example, the "ethics training" was full of details about what the exact penalties for various things were.
Perhaps your sense of ethics depends on what the penalties are. Mine doesn't.
My notion of ethics also doesn't have monetary cutoffs saying that it is fine to accept a gift of $24, but unethical to accept one of $26. That's a distinction of law - not of ethics. But it was part of our "ethics training".
One of my "favorites" early in my career was the conclusion that the combination of several "ethics" laws required me to limit my work to things far below my best capabilities, which seemed pretty unethical to me. Not worth elaborating the details. (The short form is that I was required to work according to my job description, which was required to match my grade, which was limited by time in service, even though I could do work several levels higher). Me and my boss both agreed that this was silly (and unethical), so we just ignored it, but that was the "official" position from the personnell office.
I suppose that since you think it is bullshit to claim that laws and ethics don't always match perfectly, you must agree that it would have been ethical for me to sit on my ass 3/4 of the time after I had finished everything that my job description said I was capable of.
Oh, that's not what you meant? Then perhaps you ought to be a little less quick with the profanity-laced judgments.
Ahh, a global warming flunky. Have any evidence to back your claims? It appears that, as usual, you are lobbing insults to make up for the fact that you are empty handed.
Here's a link for you. It's not an opinion column. It's the law in question. I'm no lawyer, but reading that seems to indicate that federal employees soliciting campaign contributions for a specific partisan candidate is illegal. Period. Location and/or mode of solicitation aren't even mentioned. Section 7323 (a)(2)(C).
So it really doesn't matter where this government employee did it, he broke the law. He did it at work, on a government server/network. Other than indicating that's how they nailed him, it's beside the point. It's mandatory to fire him or give him a minimum 30 day probation. He got 90 days. Apparently, he should have known better.