Is Your Boss Spying on You? Inside New Workplace Surveillance

• surveillance
• privacy
• Buzzword

Jeffrey W. Keener is a corporate keymaster—one of a rapidly growing number of security professionals who can unlock all your office secrets. Whether you’re on a PC in the next room or a Mac in Madagascar, Keener is just a few keystrokes away from watching the contents of strangers’ hard drives whiz by. It may seem Orwellian, but this constant monitoring is a crucial cog in the well-oiled machine of business investigation—and one more inevitable tick on the countdown to a surveillance society. I saw it in action last week at the fourth-floor New York satellite office of California-based Guidance Software (which boasts Halliburton, Lowe’s and many Fortune 500 companies among its clients), as Keener called up one of his surveillance programs.

“Is this real-time?” I asked.

“Oh yeah,” he assured me. “This is what’s on the server right now.”

I squinted at the screen, because at first glance it didn’t look like much: a series of windows displaying a directory of system files and open applications, broken down into file trees as you might see when exploring your home computer. But beneath this commonplace graphical interface is a new high-tech tug of war between employees and their employers over personal information in the workplace.

Americans are trapped in a technological and demographic change that has increasingly pulled our personal communications into our offices. According to a 2006 survey from the U.S. Census Bureau, 54.6 percent of all married couples now have both husband and wife in the workforce, so those calls to the school principal, transactions with online banking and lovers' spats will inevitably take place using company computers and telephones—especially with the corporate e-mail market expected to expand more than tenfold to 130 million accounts worldwide by the end of 2010. And while a large majority of Americans actually favor more forms of surveillance for law enforcement, many of the personal expectations they still hold dear don’t apply when punching in 9-to-5. “I always tell people, ‘There is no true privacy in this country any more,’” says lawyer Sharon D. Nelson, president of Sensei Enterprises, a consulting firm specializing in legal technology and computer forensics. “And that’s more true at the workplace than anywhere else.”

You may think the data is yours, but the equipment is theirs, and employers reserve the right to micromanage all the bits and packets on their networks, computers and mobile devices. There’s no such thing as unreasonable search and seizure when it comes to company property, and the surveillance tools used by IT departments are getting stealthier and more powerful—and more heavily funded each year. How do you know if you’re under suspicion? You don’t. If it were your computer Keener was exploring, you’d probably never know.

“Our software agent runs in the background and rarely uses more than 20 percent of the computer’s processing power,” he says. “If you had an iPod or digital camera charging through the USB port, we could browse all the files that were stored onto the device.”

(Listen to the author's tips you need for corporate spying on The Popular Mechanics Show podcast!)

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