Eternal vigilance – the price of liberty?

Companies give so much attention to warding off challenges from outside that they frequently fail to see the enemy within. Employees are a company’s greatest asset, but also their greatest source of potential liability. That is why JP Morgan has hired over 2,500 compliance experts and spent $730 million over the last three years to develop an automated surveillance system in order to spot rogue employees.

Yet it is not just the world’s biggest investment bank that needs to be vigilant. Every day employees in many companies are colluding over business deals that senior management would not approve if they knew the facts, staff are talking about joining a rival company or undermining the company because they did not get the pay hike or promotion they expected. Sure, counter-espionage technologies appear at first to be draconian, but if you think about it they do not do anymore than human beings would do anyway if they had a million ears and eyes. Wrong doing is wrong doing – however it is detected and the great thing about an automated system is that it does not care at all what name you are going to call your cat or where you are going to holiday this year (unless that is in North Korea or Syria)

Not every employer will be able to afford the costly systems developed in the finance sector, but there are extremely powerful off-the-shelf solutions like that produced by Interguard that will track which websites are visited, social media interactions made, keystroke volumes and patterns produced and alert management when high risk words are used in emails. Most important of all it will allow continuous screenshots in real time – so if there are grounds for suspecting computer misuse it can be tracked as it happens.

I think we should move away from sensitivities to infringements of privacy when dealing with the use of company systems and equipment – especially during company time. Of course, that will not stop the determined malcontent using their own laptop on a VPN connection – which will disguise who and where they are – but that is why companies also need a sound whistleblower policy – to encourage colleagues who suspect a problem to confide their concerns.

FedEE will be running two video-conferenced interviews next month on whistleblowing. They will begin with me – a somewhat reluctant “guinea pig” – as I have myself been a whistleblower and uncovered blatant fraud by colleagues in a former enterprise. When it happens to you the decision to expose the fraud to senior colleagues is an easy one – but the aftermath can bring marginalization and huge regrets

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