London, Sept 2 (ANI): A UK body has warned employers that they could end up being sued for discrimination if they use websites like Facebook to spy on the private lives of their workers.
Acas, the body that helps improve relationships with workers, issued a new guide that urges employers not to be “heavy-handed” by penalising staff for unprofessional comments on websites.
It has also warned employers about the risks of “Googling” potential recruits and using any personal information gleaned from the Internet such as a person’s religious beliefs.
The guide, which took nine months to compile, has been written in response to what Acas describes as the “growing problem” posed by social networking websites.
John Taylor, Acas’ chief executive, advised bosses to be cautious about reprimanding employees for comments they make on social networking websites.
“If an employer is too tough, they need to consider the potential impact of any negative publicity. Heavy-handed monitoring can cause bad feeling and be time consuming,” the Telegraph quoted him as saying.
“A manager wouldn’t follow an employee down the pub to check on what he or she said to friends about their day at work. Just because they can do something like this online, doesn’t mean they should,” he stated.
Acas has advised bosses to draft their own social media policy in order to avoid staff confusion about what is and isn’t allowed online.
Taylor also said employees needed to be cautious about the information they publish online.
“Online conduct should not differ from offline conduct,” he added.
Employees should assume that everything they say on the Internet could be made public, and should think whether they want their colleagues or boss to read it.
“They might not mean it, but what they post could end up being seen by billions of people worldwide,” he added. (ANI)
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Source: Supplied
The Advertiser has been told Port Adelaide-Enfield Council regularly uses the services of Dulwich-based Kingswood Investigations to monitor staff off site, which the council confirmed.
Mayor Gary Johanson defended the use of private investigators, saying only those with a guilty conscience should be concerned.
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The AP reports that New York City police, with the help of the CIA, skirt domestic surveillance laws to snoop on Americans in minority neighbourhoods
It is no secret that the New York Police Department launched its own global intelligence unit after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. But it’s news to almost everyone that the NYPD, in close and “extraordinary” collaboration with the CIA, might have bent domestic surveillance and civil rights laws by sending undercover agents to monitor Muslim enclaves and mosque services, according to a months-long investigation by the Associated Press. Here’s a look at the “astounding” NYPD “domestic CIA” operation:
What does the NYPD spy unit do?
Its goal is to gather and analyze intelligence about terrorist threats to New York. The unit has officers stationed in 11 foreign cities, and its operatives have been caught operating in New Jersey and Boston. Its most controversial initiatives, according to the AP, include the use of undercover officers (dubbed “rakers”) to troll New York’s Muslim neighborhoods looking for suspicious people and shops, and “mosque crawler” informants who report on what clerics are saying to their followers.
Where does the CIA fit in?
The unit was set up, and is still headed, by David Cohen, a retired CIA officer. Cohen brought aboard CIA agent Larry Sanchez, who stayed on the agency payroll while training police agents from his NYPD office — an unusual arrangement that appears to have breached “the wall that’s supposed to keep the CIA out of the domestic intelligence business,” the AP says. Also “blurring the lines between police work and spying,” the NYPD sent an officer to the CIA training farm to learn the agency’s tradecraft, and a senior CIA operative is currently working undercover in the top ranks of the NYPD unit.
Did any of this raise eyebrows?
NYPD lawyers raised concerns about the “raking” operations, and the intelligence unit got embroiled in an ongoing civil-liberties lawsuit after Cohen’s undercover agents infiltrated anti-war groups before the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York. The FBI also has turf issues with Cohen’s unit, and thinks it might be illegal. In fact, “senior FBI officials in New York ordered their own agents not to accept any reports from the NYPD’s mosque crawlers,” the AP says. But the authorities with oversight — the New York City Council and the federal government, which gives the unit millions in aid — have asked few questions.
Is any of this illegal?
Let’s put it this way, says John Cook at Gawker: “When the FBI’s lawyers are so concerned about your ethnic profiling that they won’t rely on your reports, you know you’re in trouble.” Throw in CIA dabbling in domestic spying, and these operations are “probably illegal.” The NYPD is evidently worried enough that it routinely shreds documents, says Adam Serwer at The American Prospect. But most of the unit’s work doesn’t “appear to violate the letter of the law,” says Doug Mataconis at Outside the Beltway. Still, “ethnic harassment” and spying on mosques and anti-war protesters is “not what the NYPD is supposed to be about.”
Sources: AP, NPR, Gawker, American Prospect, Outside the Beltway
Seoul prosecutors said today that the five allegedly passed military secrets and other sensitive information to North Korea beginning in the early 1990s.
Prosecutors say that among the funneled information were satellite photos of military bases in South Korea, US military field manuals and information on South Korean politicians.
Prosecutors say the five allegedly violated South Korea’s National Security Law, whose maximum penalty is capital punishment.
The two Koreas are still technically at war because the 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty.
(AP)
NEW YORK – Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the New York Police Department has become one of the nation’s most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies, targeting ethnic communities in ways that would run afoul of civil liberties rules if practiced by the federal government, an Associated Press investigation has found.
The operations have benefited from unprecedented help from the CIA, a partnership that has blurred the line between foreign and domestic spying.
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