In Australia, Bosses May Get Power To Snoop On Emails 287
Numerous readers noted the proposal by the Australian government for legislation to allow employers to snoop on employees' email and IM conversations. This is being proposed in the name of protecting the infrastructure from terrorism. The attorney-general cited the Estonian cyber-attacks as a reason why such employer monitoring is necessary in Australia — never mind that the attacks were perpetrated by a lone 20-year-old and not by a foreign government or terrorist. The law permitting intelligence agencies to snoop on citizens without permission expires this June, leading to the government's urgency to extend and expand it. The chairman of Electronic Frontiers Australia said, "These new powers will facilitate fishing expeditions into employees' emails and computer use rather than being used to protect critical infrastructure. I'm talking about corporate eavesdropping and witch-hunts... If an employer wanted to [sack] someone, they could use these powers."
Eh. (Score:4, Interesting)
This is not news. Frankly sometimes I think privacy advocates overreact - and I think this is one of those times.
Re:In Kiwi New Zealand (Score:3, Interesting)
Someone shut the network down, I think with a P2P site.
The network guys sit right next to me. They were having a great time tracking down the culprit. And even funnier is people were coming out of the woodwork saying "my bad!" when it wasn't even them!
But I was very much OK with that. That person was saturating the network connection and stopping real work from getting done.
Re:Sound stupid to me.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Employers can already legally snoop on emails (Score:2, Interesting)
The Attorney-General says otherwise which is a surprise to me, and also I'm sure to much of the business and legal community. The legal advice to several businesses I've worked at, is that they are well within rights to intercept employee emails.
Any Australian lawyers that can comment on this?
Re:In Kiwi New Zealand (Score:5, Interesting)
This goes for the bosses computer+email too.
There have never been any problems that I've heard of--I mean the general standard is, if you're reading someones email and you see its personal, dont read it. Just look at the business email. Not always possible, but it hasn't been a problem in my experience.
I don't really think most people use their business addresses for personal email very often incidentally--everyone seems to use yahoo/gmail/whatever. (I know I do)
Re:Sound stupid to me.... (Score:3, Interesting)
If my friends or family want to get in touch with me when I'm at work, they can call me on my personal cell phone. If they want to send an note, they can use my Gmail account. They don't get my work phone numbers or e-mail address.
Not! by a lone 20-year-old (Score:2, Interesting)
This quote is far from reality. The lone 20-year-old was the only one who got convicted, because he was the only russian caught who
lived in Estonia. Meanwhile the bulk of the attackers got away, because they live in Russia. And russia don't extradite their citizens (remember the Litvinenko case?). If you can read estonian,
A crude translation: On june 28th 2007, the reply from russian authorities denied all help to estonian government regarding the cyber-attack investigations.
Re:really? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:In Kiwi New Zealand (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:really? (Score:3, Interesting)
To avoid hassles, I simply opened up the email log file to all employees, so that any employee could peruse any other employees email, no secrets, it calmed down the contents of email significantly and saved me the disgusting chore of monitoring for legally dangerous content, and as I was in charge of the servers I had the initial legal liability for email contents until I could prove someone else was responsible.
In this case patience will be a virtue as mobile internet connections get cheaper and 2nd notebooks get even cheaper, simply send and receive personal emails on your own personal hardware and do not use company infrastructure for personal communications. Now if your company attempts to ban personal communications hardware, or attempts to intercept and monitor personal communications on your own hardware, than use the unions to rip in up the employers and work to ensure management can ponder the error of their ways from the confines of a prison cell.