Editorial excerpts regarding the new U.S. law which expands government's authority to eavesdrop.
"I’d Rather Be Spied on Than Dead or Out of Work" ~ Denny Hatch
"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.
...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."
(Cautionary Tale Alert)
"...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." (more)
