Employee Crime and Employee Monitoring Ryan Gray Eric Van Horn

Roadmap  Employee crime  Sabotage  Employee monitoring  Laws and cases  Case study  Conclusion

Employee Crime  Embezzlement and company sabotage  With the use of computers, employees have stolen hundreds of thousands from employers.  Some cases in the millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars.  Insurance companies have employees create fake policies.  Some steal data to sell to competitors.

Increased opportunity for embezzlement  The complexities of modern financial transactions increase the opportunities.  Victims of most costly scams include:  Banks  Brokerage houses  Insurance companies  Other large financial institutions

Sabotage  Fired or angry employees sometimes sabotage the company computer systems.  Motivations for sabotage are not new. What is new with computer sabotage is the ease with which saboteurs can cause a great amount of damage.

Protecting against frauds  Many practices reduce the likelihood of large frauds.  Responsibilities of employees with access to sensitive computer systems are rotated.  Each employee should have their own user ID and password.  Access control.  Immediate cancelation of access after an employee quits or is fired.  Careful screening and background checks on potential employees can be helpful

Employee monitoring “Technology now allows employers to cross the line from monitoring the work to monitoring the worker. - Cindia Cameron  Monitoring employees is nothing new.  Computers have made new kinds of monitoring possible.

Employee monitoring cont’d  Surveillance cameras  Telephone recordings  Keystroke loggers  GPS monitoring 

Law and cases  There is little law controlling workplace monitoring  The Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA)  Prohibits interception of and reading of stored without a court order  Does not prohibit employers from reading employee on company systems  Does this seem ethical?

Law and cases cont’d  Courts place much weight on he fact that the computers, mail, and phone systems used at work are the property of the employer  Are provided for business purposes only  Courts sometimes rule against employers  If there is a convincing case that monitoring was done to snoop on personal activities  Track down whistleblowers  Decisions depend on a conclusion about whether an employee had a reasonable “expectation of privacy”  This concept is not always clear

National Labor Relations Board  Sets rules and decides cases about worker-employer relations  Workers have legal right to communicate with each other about work conditions  May do so on company systems in some cases  Companies must discuss policies  Use of surveillance cameras  Drug testing  Lie detector tests

Case Study  Headline: FDA staffers sue agency over surveillance of personal .  Beginning in 2012  Allegedly, FDA began to read personal s of 5 employees  Gained Access through keyloggers and interception

Allegations by employees  5 Doctors and scientists involved  Employees claim FDA was approving radiological devices that posed unacceptable risks to patients  Internal complaints were filed in 2007  FDA read and disclosed personal s addressed to members of Congress

Formal Lawsuit  The employees filed a formal lawsuit citing a violation of their constitutional rights.  They argue viewing their personal, not company, is unconstitutional.  FDA had to right to hold information over the employees head

Positive and Negative rights  Negative  The right to act without interference  Leave me alone  Positive  The right to allow or oblige action  Rights guaranteed by laws

StakeHolders  FDA officials  Employees  Doctors and Scientists  Public  Patients with cancer

FDA standpoint  Employees of the FDA have “no reasonable expectation of privacy” while using company computers.  FDA has the positive right to invade privacy  Protect FDA name  Continue to advance cancer research  Information leaks undermine FDA efforts  They assert the employees broke the law, not the FDA

Employee standpoint  Employees have the negative right to correspond with Congress without interference  Whistle Blower protections  Government correspondence is especially private  Employees have positive right to oblige action from the law  FDA should be punished for invading personal

Public standpoint  Public has the negative right to receive the treatment they desire  Risks of new technologies is their right to take  Utilitarian belief supports this view  Possible sacrifice of people is for the overall greater good  Kantian belief grossly opposes this view  By approving these devices, the FDA is using the public as means to an end

Outcomes  Investigation is still on going  Being overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services.  Of the 5 involved  1 fired  2 didn’t have contracts renewed  2 claimed they were passed over for promotion and quit

Solutions  Solutions could go in three ways  Favor FDA  Favor Employees  Favor the public  Indirectly the FDA  What do you think?????  Who has rights?  Who violated laws?

Conclusion  Technologies used for employee monitoring  Technologies used to commit employee crime  Case study  Ethical analysis

References  A Gift of Fire  monitoring-lawsuit_n_ html  sue-agency-over-surveillance-of-personal-e- mail/2012/01/23/gIQAj34DbQ_story.html