Howard Lowndes wrote:
On Tue, 2004-03-30 at 20:43, James Gray wrote:
On Tue, 30 Mar 2004 04:38 pm, Howard Lowndes wrote: *snipped*
"Unless employers have a court order, they will need to give employees notice that surveillance will be conducted," he said.
That could mean a warning box pops up when the computer is turned on.
We already have a pre-login message on our systems that basically says:
"You agree to adhere to the acceptable use policy. You understand that anything and everything you do is logged and monitored and by logging into this system agree to allow this to occur. If you don't like this, HR will be happy to receive your resignation."
add to this "...and archived..."
Mind you, the resignation bit might just land you in trouble,
Ah - the resignation bit was an alcoholic attempt at humour ;) The actual wording is along the lines "...if you're found in breach of either our AUP or local law, then we may throw the book at you and/or report your activities, along with all our logs, to relevant law enforcement authorities." Our AUP states it could be a sackable offence to use our infrastructure for personal use without prior approval etc. Our legal boffins in the US-of-A conjured all this up and it caused an Indian expat in Boston to be deported back to his mother land. I guess it's fairly tight and enforceable.
I wonder if that's enough? Besides our mail gateway and ms-exchange server are in Boston, MA, so I guess we aren't exactly in the NSW jurisdiction....or are we?
probably, if the NSW courts so determine it. Just look at the Gutnik case in Victoria a couple of years ago.
That's what I was thinking when I wrote it. There is some common law precedents that would suggest that the physical location of the equipment is irrelevant etc.
<SOAP_BOX>
I hate all this legal crap - they're lusers for fsck's sake. They aren't smart enough to know what's best for them....dammit! They want to send porn to their mates and chew vast amounts of bandwidth on non-work related crap on MY network and now the government says - sure, that's OK, that's why you give them Internet access!?! Gaddam!!
It's also the reason why you install proxies, relay blocking and traffic shaping. Mind you, it would be more economic to do that over Linux or *BSD than it ever would over M$.
We already do this with a mix of mail filters, squid proxies and content filtering firewalls (Cisco PIX). If the state government says "no snooping" then we lock down the whole show and poke holes in it for work stuff only. The rest of the net will cease to exist in the office.
There is nothing that says that you have to allow your employees to have email access other than that which is work related.
They might scream, but screw them...
Their screams are sweet music to the BOFH, and me >:-)
Cheers,
James
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