I’d Rather Be Spied on Than Dead or Out of Work

If you don’t want your life to be an open book, move to the Seychelles

August 2007 By Denny Hatch

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The year was 1987. Democratic presidential front-runner Gary Hart was rumored to be having an extramarital fling. “Follow me around. I don’t care. I’m serious,” he challenged the media. “If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They’ll be very bored.”

A couple of Miami Herald reporters did indeed put a tail on Hart and found a yummy blonde named Donna Rice. Shortly thereafter, a photo surfaced of Hart and Rice canoodling in the Bahamas aboard a yacht, aptly named Monkey Business.

Hart not only lost his front-runner status, he was no longer a runner at all. He also opened Pandora’s box—giving the green light for the media to spy on politicians’ private lives, which were theretofore pretty much off-limits.

Unlike Gary Hart, I haven’t asked anyone to spy on me.

Yet know I am being spied on—by government, by business, by marketers—and were I holding down a real job in a real office, my employer would be spying on me.

And I am glad of it.

Quite simply, we are all being spied on. Get used to it.

Can We Trust Big Brother?
Let me say at the outset, I do not trust big government. For example, In the past two weeks:

• Investigators have begun this morning to try to determine the cause of a highway bridge collapse in Minneapolis that has killed at least seven people and injured more than 60. Officials warn that the death toll is likely to climb today as divers search dozens of cars submerged in the Mississippi River. “This is a catastrophe of historic proportions for Minnesota,” Minnesota Gov. Pawlenty said Wednesday, hours after the busy bridge over Interstate 35W collapsed during the evening rush hour.
—William M. Welch; Alan Gomez; USA Today, August 2, 2007

• A federal judge held the FBI “responsible for the framing of four innocent men” in a 1965 gangland murder in a landmark ruling yesterday and ordered the government to pay the men $101.7 million for the decades they spent in prison. The award is believed to be the largest of its kind nationally.
—Shelly Murphy and Brian R. Ballou, The Boston Globe, July 27, 2007

• Australia’s top law enforcement authorities have been forced into a humiliating admission that they wrongly arrested, charged and threw into a jail a young Indian doctor, Mohamed Haneef, whom they thought was connected with terrorist attacks in Britain.
—Bernard Lagan, Sydney, The Times (U.K.), July 27, 2007

• Trying to stanch the furor over the mishandling of the death of Corporal Pat Tillman, a former football star killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan, the U.S. Army has censured a retired three-star general for errors and deceptions and apologized to the Tillman family and the public for “mistakes, misjudgments and a failure of leadership.”
—Neil A. Lewis, The New York Times, August 1, 2007

• Former Durham District Attorney Michael B. Nifong, appearing downcast and contrite, apologized in court yesterday for his aggressive prosecution on rape charges of three former Duke University lacrosse players. He admitted there was “no credible evidence” against them.
—David Zucchino, Los Angeles Times, August 27, 2007

Last year I heard an expert on the Middle East tell NPR listeners that he estimated 25 percent of the world’s Muslims—or approximately 300 million people—would like to see serious harm come to the United States. What’s more, a high percentage would be willing to become martyrs in the cause.

Even though I do not trust governments, they are the only organizations empowered to protect me by keeping tabs of bad guys and neutralizing them before they neutralize me.

A Quick Bill Clinton Story
In July 2002, my wife, Peggy, and I attended a private conference in Aspen, Colo., where former President Bill Clinton was the featured speaker. He told us that following the World Trade Center attack the previous September, one of top executives at Acxiom—the Arkansas data processing giant—called him with some fascinating news. An Acxiom analyst had gone through the past several years of data and had tracked lead terrorist Mohamed Atta to 12 different addresses around the country. Clinton suggested that if some computer whiz could create an algorithm that flagged this kind of behavior out of the trillions of bytes of data being generated every day, maybe future attackers could be identified and neutralized before they struck.

After Clinton’s speech, I pointed out to our host that his name would pop to the surface under such a paradigm, as he was the immigrant owner of a reported 11 houses and a yacht. My comment drew a hearty laugh.

Data Mining
What President Clinton was suggesting was data mining—the continual monitoring of the massive corporate and governmental databases to identify potential terrorists and keep tabs on them.

Currently, Congress has its knickers in a twist because in his testimony Attorney General Alberto Gonzales never revealed that the government was involved in such computer searches as well as warrantless phone surveillance.

If the government wants to search my phone call records, my credit card purchases and the Web sites I have visited to write this e-zine, they are welcome to that data. In the immortal words of Gary Hart, “They will be very bored.”

Is such a system an invasion of my civil rights?

Hey, I want to be protected from another 9/11 or a radioactive truck bomb blowing up Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell six blocks from my house in Center City Philadelphia.

And if mining my data, surveillance of my phone records, monitoring my Web activities and tracking my movements with spy cams will keep me safe, so be it.

The Spy Cam Controversy
“The Big Brother nightmare of George Orwell’s ‘1984’ has become a reality in the shadow of the author’s former London home,” wailed the Web site, “This Is London,” in March of this year. “According to the latest studies, Britain has a staggering 4.2 million CCTV cameras—one for every 14 people in the country—and 20 percent of cameras globally. It has been calculated that each person is caught on camera an average of 300 times daily.”

Are spy cams a “nightmare” or a “chilling image” as the writer said later in the article? Londoners were lucky to have had them in place to capture images of the subway bombers of July 7, 2005 and the failed terrorist plot of this past June 30.

Spy Cams and Collateral Data
Because spy cams can read license plates and identify individual people, they catch speeders, hit-and-run offenders, drunk drivers, car-jackers and bank robbers. Those citizens driving around town minding their business have nothing to fear.

On July 18, UPI reported that the Brits were upset that the 1,500 special traffic-tax cameras in London were about to do double-duty to “track suspect vehicles and drivers” for law enforcement surveillance. “It is one thing to ask the public for special measures to fight the grave threat of terrorism,” said Shami Chakrabarti of the civil rights group, Liberty. “But when that becomes a Trojan horse for mass snooping for more petty matters it only leads to a loss of trust in government.”

In addition, London—with the foulest air in the U.K.—is also employing a new spy cam on London Bridge to identify lorries, busses and cars that fail to meet emissions standards. The fine: £200 (US$400) a day. Is this not a good thing?

Despite civil libertarians decrying the loss of privacy from spy cams, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll released last Sunday, 71 percent of Americans are in favor of them. In other words, Americans don’t mind giving up some of their civil liberties if the surrender holds out the hope of safety for themselves, their family and community.

Corporate Spying on Employees—A Quick Story
A number of years ago, I made a speech to the Canadian Direct Marketing Association in Ottawa. That morning, the daily paper reported that the Bureau of Fisheries required a massive overhaul of its phone system due to a dramatic increase in traffic. In light of the wild over-fishing that had sent the Canadian fishing industry into the tank, the minister looked into why in the world additional phone lines were needed when basically nobody had much to do. It turns out that each of the 10,000 employees was making an average of seven visits a day to Internet porn sites. (P.S., the phone system was not upgraded.)

I don’t cotton to companies spying on their employees. But—when in the office—if they are making seven visits a day to porn sites, freelancing, blogging, updating their Facebook.com page and writing mash notes on company time—or revealing company secrets to competitors—they should be fired.

The compromising of corporate secrets is the most serious; if a competitor gets inside your IT system, learns your plans, finds out your costs and steals your business, you will be toast.

For example, a 2002 survey by the American Society for Industrial Security International revealed that U.S. companies lost $59 billion in proprietary information and intellectual property and up to 69% of that was stolen by insiders. A new study was promised in 2005, but has not been released.

From the self-help law Web site nolo.com:
A survey of more than 700 companies by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) found that almost three-quarters of the companies monitor their workers’ use of the Internet and check employee e-mail, and more than half review employee phone calls. According to a study by the American Management Association, businesses offering financial services—such as banks, brokerage houses, insurance firms, and real estate companies—are most likely to monitor their workers’ communications.

Worklife columnist Carol Kleiman writes, “My advice: Don’t write anything in an e-mail that you wouldn’t want to see on your office bulletin board—or hear announced over your company’s loudspeaker.”

Monitoring Your Internet Behavior
In late July, AOL announced that it would acquire Tacoda, a firm that targets the behavior of people who browse the Internet. The Aug. 1 issue of The Wall Street Journal featured a Q&A with Bill Grossman, president and CEO of Revenue Science, a competitor of Tacoda. Quite simply, technology has made it possible to send targeted advertisements on the Internet based on the Web sites a person has visited. Does it make me nervous? No more so than receiving junk mail based on prior purchases. What makes me crazy is opening my AOL mailbox and finding 100 messages—as I did this morning—with not one of them being relevant. I lost precious time going through them.

Incidentally, if you want to keep your Web browsing anonymous, see the hyperlinks below.

Misuse of Data and Suggested Penalties
Personal and corporate data are highly sensitive and if made available or misused can result in stolen identities, looted bank and credit card accounts, and wrongful arrests and incarceration.

On Aug. 1 2007, the Pennsylvania Higher Education Agency reported a laptop was stolen with the names, addresses and Social Security numbers of 5,300 student loan customers.

I have said before and will say again, people responsible for the safeguarding of data who betray that trust should go to jail. No making nice. No slap on the wrist and admonition not to let it happen again. I’m talking jail. And one strike and you’re out; if it happens once, the mishandler not only goes to the slammer, but is barred from working in the information industry ever again.

P.S. If you want to know the rules about spying on employees—what you may and may not do—see the hyperlink below.