1- Script and Recording

Employees' computer network abuse A risk for business

Prison sentences could await business bosses who do not do enough to stop the most serious abuse of computer networks by employees. The warning comes from legal experts who say firms are open to prosecution because they are so ignorant about what employees are doing with company computers. In the most serious cases some firms are unknowingly harbouring illegal images on work PCs and servers. Firms are being urged to take the problem of network abuse as seriously as they do fire prevention.

Staff misuse of the net is much greater than abuse of any other work system, according to statistics gathered for the 2004 Information Security Breaches survey. For 8% of companies questioned in the survey, web abuse was responsible for a firm's worst security incident of the year. The availability of software tools that prevent the entry of illegal images into the corporation has made the threshold of neglect significantly lower

Net law expert Dr Brian Bandey said companies were legally obliged to stop the most serious incidents which involve the making and storing of child pornography using work systems. "The law fixes criminal responsibility on the corporation itself and the decision-makers within it who have both the power and responsibility to decide corporate policy and strategy." Criminal responsibility for illegal images on work networks could be pinned on directors if it could be shown that they had not done enough to stop such things, he said.

Proving someone had been neglectful in this area would involve showing that they had not done what they should have. "The easier it is to stop something happening the easier it is to prosecute someone for this type of neglect," he said. The consequences of neglectfully allowing the storing or making of illegal images would be a jail term of up to 10 years, said Dr Bandey.

George Godar, a technology partner at law firm DLA, said the problem of net abuse was only just being confronted by many companies, though few had worked out just how to tackle it yet. "They do not know about it or prefer not to know about it," he said. "If they did think about it, it would require pro-active work on their part. But, he added, the legal consequences of net abuse by employees were real.

Both experts agree the key to good management of such incidents was a policy on net use that was regularly communicated to employees and which made clear the consequences for anyone transgressing it.

Story from BBC NEWS:
Original Title: Work porn risk for businesses
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/technology/3701907.stm
Published: 2004/05/17 07:41:55 GMT
© BBC MMIV

End of Recording

2- Summary

For more help, click here: writing tips

Important Note:

• Students were asked to write a 50/100 word summary. Note the four main points (who abuses the internal computer network- pedophilia (UK English or paedophilia US English)- prison sentence- top management responsibility)

The occasion for this BBC News Online article published in May 2004 is a recent survey carried out in the UK which raises the thorny issue of internet abuse in the workplace. Legal experts call employers' attention to the fact they are legally responsible for the inappropriate use of the internal computer network by their employees. They may choose to disregard this issue but they face a ten-year jail sentence should they fail to take proper action against employees browsing child porn sites or storing inappropriate images. They are advised to raise employees' awareness and to implement internal policy changes.

• Please note the new format of LX 330. Com as of October 2004: summaries will no longer be required.
  Students will listen to the recording three times then only write an Opinion Question.
  They will be expected to show how much they understood from the tape by transferring this information into the Opinion Question.
  The aim of this new strategy is to guide students towards making a more efficient use of transferable information and to include examples from the tape (and from classes) in their Opinion Question.
  

3- Opinion Question

For more help, click here: writing tips
collective September exam opinion questions

Opinion Question (no more than 250 words) : Discuss the following statement: « Employees bear a large part of the responsibility for what they send or receive over the company's computer network".
Your essay should include specific examples to support your arguments.

Most Common Mistakes

1) Students failed to analyze the statement and jumped into the "privacy rights" arguments against corporate prying without reflecting on the fact that this time it was law-breaking employees who were under heavy fire. In other terms, one needs to use what one learns in classes but one also needs to adapt it to a new context.

2) Most papers fell in the same trap when they argued that employees are by nature or definition blameless. The most common line of arguments was something like "of course, a poor inexperienced employee (me) is so blameless that if something goes wrong, then how can it be blamed on (me)?
Many students could have avoided getting off the tracks by relating this idea to the question raised. They could have written something like this,

" Naturally, an undertrained but honest employee may unwittingly help spread spam by allowing his/her machine to be turned into a spam relay by an undetected virus. But this is quite different from the disgruntled employee who recklessly contributes to virus outbreaks, commits fraud, and quite different from the criminal employee who engages in illegal activities by using the company as a cover, by stealing vital data or cracking corporate computer systems from the inside. Whenever unqualified employees become a hazard to the company, management is called on to look into ways to retrain employees. But this is a far cry from the situation in which an employee voluntarily breaks the law. The question raised is thus, should management be legally liable to employees' criminal offences?"

3) Students waffled without relating their argumentation to concrete examples which could have been taken from course materials or their personal job experience. Too many papers confused management with government or society or politicians also expected to redress all the wrongs in the world.

4) Too many students failed to use their time well, re-read and eliminate basic (unpardonable) mistakes of expression.

e.g. responsible, responsibility, to be held responsible for, responsibility for

to have access to the internet
to receive

The following essay is a hotch-potch of students' exam papers. Note how examples are provided to sustain argumentation and how structural phrases learnt in classes are used.

I, for one, find it hard to believe that an employee would indulge in criminal activities in the workplace. I am definitely more familiar with articles reporting on corporate prying. However, employee blamelessness versus corporate guilt is not the issue today. It is necessary to draw the line between privacy rights aimed to protect employees from corporate harassment (wiretapping, video surveillance, etc) and the criminal wrongdoings of employees who browse inappropriate pages using company computers, engage in illegal activities by using the company as a cover, or leak vital information to competitors.
What I gathered from the recording is that even if employees bear a large part of the responsibility for what they do on the internet, it is their bosses who are ultimately responsible in the law. The fact that employees' willful wrongdoing should be met with management's legal liability should arrest our attention. We are told that whenever employees knowingly break the internal regulations they promised to respect in their hiring contracts, show disregard for common ethics and engage in criminal activities in their worktime, they also legally involve their companies and bosses who cannot claim they were ignorant of such details.They become accessory to the employees' crimes. This may be linked to or contrasted with other communications abuse questions, where employees bear a substantially larger share of the responsibility if they are informed of their rights and limitations.
At the end of the day, what strikes me most is that companies increasingly depend on internal and outside communications to insure maximum development but are correspondingly vulnerable to net misuse by their employees.

(265 words)

Some Advice:

1) After reading the opinion question statement, the first thing to do is to rally one’s knowledge of the issue (which was extensively discussed in class) and simply reflect on what employees may receive or send via the net.

2) Then before writing, it is vital to lay out a rough line of arguments. Take the time to decide what you wish to argue first, and then start writing.
Students are strongly advised to think first, write second. Not the other way round.

3) Exam papers are directly connected to material covered in class. Keep up with classwork and show that you actively participated.

4) It is worth repeating Steven Schaefer's remark. "Often, attempts to integrate information from the listening were made by quoting passages word for word, often without using so much as ‘according to’ or quotation marks. This is not an acceptable form of writing on an opinion question. The sense of what is reformulation and what is outright plagiarism should be taken more seriously."

created by: Geneviève Cohen-Cheminet