Reuters has an article today about IT staff members who use their administrative privileges to snoop on the personal data of their companies.  Apparently the trend is growing.

I won’t put up a quote because the concept is pretty self explanatory.  But I do want to make two points in regards to the problem itself.

1.  On Integrity: This article spotlights behavior that is eventually going to be disastrous for society.  For some reason a large part of the IT community has developed this attitude of “I get to do what I think is right damn the consequences” and it’s becoming a huge issue because of the wide spread support among IT professionals. 

Remember the IT manager in San Francisco who wouldn’t hand over the administrator passwords because he disapproved of the city’s position on cyber security?  He was cheered on by many in the blogosphere.  How about music pirates who just take the songs they want instead of paying for them?  Again, loved by the blogosphere.  Not to mention everyone who wants to shut down any and all Facebook groups they don’t approve of. 

This attitude of “we have the power so we therefore have the right to use it as we please” has to stop or normal people will just stop trusting IT all together.  When that time comes these IT mavericks will have done us all a disservice.

2.  On Snooping: I’ve had IT people work under me on several occasions and every time I give them the same snooping speech.  It basically goes like this…

Snooping is stupid.  You’re risking not only your job but your career if you get caught because no one is going to hire an IT person who has a history of sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong. 

More importantly snooping doesn’t work.  Communications between people are a tapestry.  They e-mail, IM, talk in person and so on.  That makes the data you’re snooping for irrelevant.  Let me give you an example.

Say I give you a project that requires working with an outside firm and that project completely falls apart because of the outside firm.  Then the CFO orders me, via e-mail, to fire you for screwing up the project.  Upon getting that message I go to the CFO and talk to him in person (because of the importance of the discussion).  I explain it wasn’t your fault and that all the problems were caused by the outside vendor.  The CFO agrees and we both forget about the whole thing.

If you are snooping on our e-mails all you’re going to see is the “fire him” message.  You’ll spend the next few weeks walking on eggshells over something that we’ve completely forgotten because you snooped. 

So in the end not only are you risking your career to snoop but it isn’t even an accurate way of getting information.