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Ways Employers Spy
Vericept makes products to monitor other Web activities as well. Paul Pilotte, a senior product manager at the company, says it helped one client fend off a harassment suit filed by a senior employee who claimed someone had left printouts from an adult website in her office. The company planned to give her a large severance package until it used a Vericept tool to examine her Web use. That search, Pilotte says, found that the employee had printed the pages herself. On another occasion, Vericept helped catch a worker who had installed a keylogger on a manager’s computer to extract the boss’s passwords.
One product that monitors an individual desktop is NetVizor. It can record everything a person types, from bank passwords to the names of illnesses searched on WebMD. It also logs and monitors e-mails sent and received (including those in personal Yahoo!, Hotmail and Gmail accounts), instant message chats, and the names of documents opened or printed. It can even capture a snapshot of a computer screen, providing an employer with a replica of what the employee is seeing on his or her monitor. (Another product called Mobile Spy takes some of the same stealth surveillance to company-issued cell phones by allowing the boss to view a log of phone numbers called and see every text message sent.)
Kelly Todd, information-services security analyst for Securities America Financial Corporation, an independent broker dealer with several hundred employees, won’t say what kind of software his company uses. But he does say as soon as “somebody types an e-mail and hits Send, before it even gets to the central e-mail server, it goes through a system that archives the e-mail.”
No one “sits there reading e-mail,” he adds. But employees know that they’re being monitored. “We tell them, If you’re not willing to stand on your desk and shout something across the room, don’t put it in an e-mail, because somewhere down the road, someone will read it.”
Most large companies are like Todd’s, says Lawrence Orans, an analyst for Gartner Research: They monitor overall e-mail traffic and only target a worker if a problem pops up.
That’s how Tasha Newitt got snared. Newitt and seven co-workers were fired by the Washington State Department of Labor and Industries after the agency examined all employees’ e-mail usage. The inquiry followed a female worker’s sexual harassment claim against a male manager in 2001. In the process, investigators found 418 personal messages in Newitt’s account.
Newitt, who had processed workers’ compensation claims for eight years, admits that one e-mail to her boyfriend discussing intimate details of their relationship was inappropriate. But, she says, most of what the agency objected to involved joke e-mails (some sent by supervisors, she claims), a poem and birthday wishes, plus messages she got but didn’t open or forward. The agency was unmoved. Her termination letter, Newitt says, didn’t cite her for sending personal e-mails but for receiving them and not reporting them to a supervisor.
“I had a death in my family, and so I had received on that day an e-mail from a friend, a co-worker who was in the same building, who sent me a little poem,” Newitt says. “And that was in my termination letter.”
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