Employee surveillance unaffected by terror threat
Published: 29 Oct 2002 15:25 GMT
The General Accounting Office, an auditing arm of Congress, said in a report released on Monday that corporate-level monitoring of email and Web use does not appear to have changed since the 11 September, 2001, terrorist attacks.
"None of the employers we interviewed had increased the amount or type of information they gathered on employees' use of email, the Internet or computer files," the report said. Under the USA Patriot Act, signed by President Bush a year ago, law enforcement received more power to conduct Internet surveillance and seek information from private companies.
Interviews with government officials, privacy experts and executives at 14 Fortune 1000 companies also showed that, contrary to popular belief, few employees are disciplined for inappropriate Internet behaviour.
"The total number of investigations was very small as a proportion of the number of employees with access to email (or) the Internet," the report said. "The number of annual investigations... represented less than 1 percent of the total domestic employees at these companies. For example, one company with more than 50,000 domestic employees reported 72 email investigations and 48 Internet investigations in calendar year 2001."
The late Rep. Patsy Mink, the senior Democrat on a House work force subcommittee, had asked the GAO to investigate electronic workplace monitoring of Americans.
Under current law in general and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 in particular, US employers can monitor all Internet activity of their employees. Because companies own their computers and networks, courts have ruled that employees should have no "reasonable expectation of privacy" at work.
Of the 14 companies interviewed, the GAO found that all collected and stored employees' email and information about what Web sites were visited. The report said that "six of 14 companies told us that they routinely performed additional analyses on the stored information to determine if employees were misusing company computer resources."
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