Slashdot Mirror
Report Finds More Aussie Gov't Workers Misusing Internet
destinyland writes "A new report to Australia's parliament announces a 54% increase in government workers misusing the internet. In fiscal year 2010, 313 different federal workers came under investigation for improper use of e-mail or the internet, up from just 202 in the previous year. The report — available online as a PDF file — also discovered that nearly half the investigated workers were in the Australian Tax Office, according to an Australian technology blog. 'Maybe it's just a case of particularly boring work making such distractions more attractive,' they suggest, since the report blames most of the discovered cases on one-time incidents of poor judgment."
Huge year-to-year changes are more likely to result from changes to enforcement rather than changes to actual behavior.
I demand the Australian Government sends a strong message that this won't be tolerated. They must dissolve the Australian Tax Office.
Government workers are people too. Just like the people in businesses all around the world shopping for shoes on the clock.
Makes you wonder what costs more: 313 federal workers shopping for shoes on the clock, or the 313 investigations into their behavior that ensued.
After years and years of abuse by the Australian government and the laws they made concerning it, now the internet also has to suffer the misuse by Australien government workers.
Would someone please think of the electrons?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Maybe it's different in areas other than tech, but in technology, both in industry and in academia, there isn't much correlation between the productivity of a worker and their tendency to "misuse the internet". There are plenty of very productive people who also post on Twitter a few times a day, take a brief detour while googling for an answer to a tech question to answer a question on StackOverflow that came up in the search, glance at a few mailing lists, and check their personal gmail compulsively. Especially for people under 35 or so, it might actually correlate positively with productivity: the kinds of people who can't keep themselves from answering StackOverflow questions, reading / posting on mailing lists, etc., are often much more proactive and plugged into many parts of the tech scene, compared to the people who just keep their head down and put in their 8 hours.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Don't get me wrong, under normal circumstances I love the Aussies. But they are such bad winners. Whenever I lose a game of chess to an Aussie they say: mate mate. Come one - I can see it's mate! Don't have to tell me twice. A bunch of insensitive clods, that's what they are!
These studies about (almost always public sector) workers and their terrible, terrible internet misuse seem like little more than ammunition for the handwringers, and maybe a couple of privatization zealouts.
Reality: Unless chained to an assembly line, under guard, most workers are going to spend some minutes a day doing some form of "nonwork". Particularly for people whose work involves a mixture of thinking and typing, it won't even be trivial to distinguish between work and nonwork, and for people whose work involves manual labor, one has to make the distinction between "rest" and "slacking off".
Given that the internet is a bottomless well of amusements, as well as an excellent way to check personal email, pay that credit card bill you just remembered to avoid a late fee, queue up a netflix item while you are still thinking about it from that conversation at lunch, etc. it seems pretty obvious that most of the white-collar nonwork is going to be internet related(and almost 100% of the visible kind is. If somebody spends 10 minutes 'cleaning their desk' in order to avoid work, nobody will ever know. If they spend 10 minutes on reddit, IT can know completely automatically.
Now, as "IT" for an institution myself, I can sympathize with IT trying to block certain sorts of extracurriculars: I don't want to get a BSA beatdown because you were on warez.ru. I don't want to spend my already overstretched time battling viruses because you just had to download free smilies and/or goat porn. If the institution's attorney's come to me and say "We are being sued for creating a hostile, porn infested work environment." I would like to be able to say "Well, we have measures in place that meet or exceed industry standards for professional content filtering; but, as no programmatic filter can be perfect, we do ultimately depend on HR's training and disciplinary procedures." rather than "Well, goodbye to my career..."
However, again in "IT"'s shoes, I don't give a fuck if you want to check your gmail, balance your checkbook, or do some online christmas shopping. If it doesn't mean legal exposure or substantial likelyhood of time consuming or costly network damage(thanks to 3rd party ad networks, virtually any site is a potential risk, but the known hives of scum and villainy are worse...) If your performance sucks, hopefully your performance reviews will reflect that and get you fired. If your performance doesn't suck, the cost of a few megabytes off our big fat institutional connection is A)sunk, we pay for the pipe whether we use it or not and B) probably less than your paperclip budget for the year. I. Don't. Care.
Worker productivity is not a problem that you can solve by dicing up their workday and micromanaging what happens during every second. Decide what performance you want, fire people who don't meet it, keep people who do, promote people who exceed it. Don't fuck around with meaningless(but easy to measure) minutia: that is practically the definition of "cargo cult management".
Oh, one other thing (this one actually causes the most friction with the users): we in "IT" generally have to block streaming music sites. This one strikes people as arbitrary and draconian; but the logic is actually pretty clear: unlike streaming video, which is bandwidth intensive but only somebody heading for a pink slip will need more than a few minutes a day of, streaming audio can easily replace the radio.
Since our primary business is not internet related, we only have a nice-but-modest commercial connection setup(ie. multiple redundancies; but actually a bit under 100Mb/s down for over 1,000 users). Since user traffic is quite bursty, this is virtually never a problem. Most user downloads are remote host limited, and against fast remote hosts 1-2 megabytes a second are not uncommon. However, if we assume that "streaming audio" means "64-128Kb/s, per terminal", even a solid 100megabit line could only support 1600 concurrent 64Kb/s or 800 128Kb/s users, and that only if nothing else where going on, which isn't the case.
I suspect that other moderate to large sites are fairly similar: their pipes are faster, and almost definitely more redundant, than what comes to your house; but if evenly divided(instead of burstily divided) among all users across a site, they are actually pretty under-provisioned. Since real-world traffic is typically bursty, they'll run like a bat out of hell if you catch them at the right time; but if the entire accounting department is tuning in to 128Kb/s EZ-listening, that could easily eat 3/4 of the pipe...
The reason the ATO is so high on the list has nothing to do with behaviour of its staff (at least there behaviour is no worse than any other departments staff) and everything to do with how strictly they enforce the rules. As someone that works with many of the agencies in Aus the enforcement ranges from ATO's strict handling of the issue to many other departments that do nothing at all or hand out warning for all but the worst breaches, hell I worked at one that specifically told me to disable logging as if they logged the traffic they would have to do something about it and they didn't have the policy's in place to handle the legal issues that would arise at the time.
Okay, so I work as a contractor for an Australian government department, as an IT Security Administrator no less... by accessing pornography, pirated material, games etc. you're opening up a vector for attack which can be exploited by a variety of malware, from Flash exploits to browser exploits, all because you bastards want to use work resources for non-work reasons. Now, I don't care that much if people use work resources for non-work reasons but when it threatens the confidentiality, integrity and availability of various systems on the network then it becomes my problem which in turn becomes everyone's problem on the network. Most of this crap is sent via email and people accessing links from said emails, with the increase of sophisticated social engineering attacks, with some specially crafted for a target, and with the average employee's ability to determine what's real and what isn't (fuck all) it can become a serious problem quite quickly especially when politicians and people with have evaluated privileges for certain systems do it as well.