The existing situation in NSW is as follows:

Privacy and your private mail, email, lockers, drawers

All workplaces would benefit from a clear understanding of the degree of privacy which employees can expect at work in relation to issues like personal mail, email, desk and locker searches.

There is no automatic legal right to privacy for personal mail delivered to a work address. Many employers reserve the right to open and inspect all mail received at work, to properly receipt cheques and remittances, as a precaution against fraud or to limit employees running their own businesses during work time.

At the same time many businesses and public agencies ask employees to provide a work address or phone number and it is not unusual for them to contact people at work. Most employers allow employees to receive private mail and phone calls as long as they do not interfere with their work.

Some people complain that letters addressed to them at work and marked personal or confidential have been opened. It is recommended that when an employer who has a policy of opening all mail receives letters marked personal or confidential, they are opened in the presence of the addressee or by the addressee in the presence of the person responsible for receipting mail. This allows the employer to be satisfied that it is genuine personal mail and gives the addressee some assurance that it is not being read or copied.

Even where confidentially addressed mail is opened and read by another person, it does not necessarily lose its status as confidential. You could have a basis for a complaint or , in extreme cases, possible legal action if the letter is copied or the information contained in the letter is used inappropriately.

A debt collecting agency which deliberately contacts you at work and discloses their reasons for calling to other employees or your employer may be breaching licensing legislation.

Electronic Mail

Unlike items of personal property that you keep in a desk drawer or locker, electronic messages you send or receive at work are not legally considered to be your personal property. Therefore an employer who owns the server or personal computer on which your email is stored is entitled to look at or copy it. Many employers reserve the right to check e-mail as a precaution against fraud, workplace harassment or breaches of confidence by employees.

However employees also have legitimate expectations of privacy in relation to their e-mail communications. A failure to acknowledge these expectations can affect the overall usefulness of providing e-mail facilities. It is strongly recommended that employers adopt clear policy statements on what rights employees can and cannot expect in relation to their electronic messages which reflect the specific needs of their organisations. All employees should be made aware of the policy.

Policies should cover:

* the requirements for storing e-mail where it relates to core business of the firm;
* whether back-up copies are stored on the server and who has access to them;
* the level of privacy employees can generally expect for their e-mail;
* the circumstances in which management reserves a right to read and take action on employee email;
* the fact that e-mail can be subject to production in litigation or other investigations;
* that it is unacceptable to use e-mail to abuse or harass other employees.

New South Wales public sector agencies should also follow the Premier’s Department Policy and Guidelines on Employer Communications Devices published in January 1999 and Protocol for the Acceptable Use of the Internet and Electronic Mail, issued in March 1999.

I think that what the Privacy Commissioner says might be incomplete, because I recall some measure introduced a few years ago where employees had to be notified, but I could be wrong if that requirement has subsequently been removed, or was only being discussed and never actually became law.

Maybe, unlike the Howard Government, they’re not used to lying yet, so when the sh*t hits the fan, they’re a bit like rabbits caught in car headlights?

Naaaaahhh. That cannot be it. Obviously.

Well, why is the government not putting the facts on the table? This story’s continuing to run through last night and today with no sign of any clarification or denial from Ministers.

They’re still waiting for permission from Kev?

Great goddlemighty employers want the right to read workers’ emails to make sure they’re doing their jobs properly. Why is that so hard for people to understand?

Under normal circumstances supervisors can just ask for employees to CC them on emails. If they can’t even get that right then there are bigger problems
I’d add that data mining is one other reason that employers would want to be able access employees work emails. You can for example help identify experts in various areas by having computers look at what people email/IM each other about. Yes, it could also be used for evil but at the same time has a legitimate use, especially in large companies where it can be difficult to find out who to ask for help.

The Federal Government’s proposal to extend the Telecommunications Act to enable employers to monitor email usage shows that the national security state mindset that afflicted the Howard Government and its bureaucrats is alive and well under the Rudd Government.

The source of this proposal is the Attorney-General’s Department, which in recent years under Phillip Ruddock and his Secretary, Robert Cornall, has led a number of successful initiatives to curb the basic freedoms and rights of Australians in the name of public safety. They include the successive iterations of the Howard Government’s draconian anti-terrorism laws and the outrageous ban on internet discussion of euthanasia.

Cornall’s most recent effort in this vein was an attempt in December to silence judicial criticism of ASIO by complaining to the NSW Judicial Commission about Justice Michael Adams, who found that ASIO agents had kidnapped and falsely imprisoned Izhar ul-Haque. The Commission rightly binned his complaint.

Now Cornall has convinced Robert McClelland that the private sector should be deputised to spy on its employees in case they turn out to be terrorists. But only in the critical infrastructure sector, McClelland assures us - which narrows it down to good corporate citizens like Telstra, airport owners, Sydney Water, petrol companies and the banks. Phew.

As Katherine Wilson demonstrated in Crikey yesterday, the extension of snooping powers to employers is part of an ongoing co-option of the private sector into the national security state framework. In particular, the protection of “critical infrastructure” has allowed the development of a complex and highly-rewarding partnership between governments and the private sector.

The critical infrastructure protection framework is overseen by Attorney-General’s Deputy Secretary Miles Jordana – John Howard’s international adviser who was at the centre of the children overboard affair and the false weapons of mass destruction claims on the basis of which Australia joined the attack on Iraq.

The private sector, across areas such as transport, communications, IT and energy, is a willing participant in the process of establishing a system for monitoring and protecting their facilities and the public infrastructure they use, all in the name of preventing or effectively responding to terrorism. After all, the process allows companies access to government funding for the maintenance and upgrading of monitoring and information-collection systems they would otherwise have to invest in themselves, enables – in the name of greater security – the development of new regulatory requirements that raise the barriers to entry for possible competitors, and transfers an element of operational risk to taxpayers.

And all in exchange for attending a few working group meetings a year and learning several dozen acronyms (language specialists - check out this page for a particularly bad case of Bureaucratic Acronymitis).

In return, governments get compliant supporters of the absurdity of the national security state – the state that requires us to suspend our critical faculties and accept long screening queues at airports, security agents who abduct people and gaol sentences for making a joke about bombs in the wrong place.

The test for any of these national security proposals should always be what might be christened the Haneef Test: would you trust the clowns who bungled that investigation, either through malice or incompetence, with even greater powers than they already have? And in this case, even if you trusted the judgement of the Australian Federal Police or ASIO, would you trust employers with the power to monitor your communications?

McClelland has promised consultation on the proposals. He should chuck them out entirely. And get rid of his two Howardist hold-outs, Cornall and Jordana, while he’s at it.

Mmmmm…. the irony is delicious. They can’t even set up their web certificates properly. Selecting “members” for a secure login gives…

“There is a problem with this website’s security certificate.

The security certificate presented by this website has expired or is not yet valid.

Security certificate problems may indicate an attempt to fool you or intercept any data you send to the server.
We recommend that you close this webpage and do not continue to this website.”

How bloody reassuring is this. In other words, “in combination with your boss we will discreetly not look at the personal stuff”. It would be quite good to clear up what email accounts we are talking about here but it sounds like privacy while accessing your hotmail, while at work, would be a no no. Same for personal phone calls at work or what you might say to someone while in the company bog?

What she says is pretty ominous.

Julia messed up.

Can you provide a link to this ‘announcement’ please bilko?

The link is the first news story that quotes Gillard: “Our technology is a big infrastructure issue these days,” Ms Gillard said. “If our banking system collapsed, if our electronic system collapsed, obviously that would have huge implications for society. So we want to make sure they are safe from terrorist attack.”

I don’t know if the proposed changes to the Telecommunications Act have been drafted yet, but I expect if they made the announcment they probably have some policy wonk working on it. An anti-terrorism law is anything justified as such and which uses the word terrorism. Clearly this government believes that it can continue the notion of terrorism as separate from ‘normal crime’.

I understand Ken Lovell’s point that this is just about getting up to date with technology. But as Paul Burns says, why did they frame it as a national security issue? Surely companies would have a duty of care to report any criminal activity in the workplace, and as several have pointed out here, they already monitor electronic communications to some extent.

So what makes it different? I return again to the “Help protect Australia from the terrorist threat” campaign. For example, one sees that some shady characters spend time late at night shifting boxes in and out of a lock-up garage. It looks suspicious, like a crime might be taking place. Do I call the police or the national security hotline? The “threat” is unspecified, insinuated, so in the end people will probably fall on racist assumptions to make that decision. This could elevate a simple stolen goods case into one of ‘terrorism’.

Likewise at the workplace - someone who decides to get their news from Youtube rather than mainstream media - say they want to look at a story on Iraq that is sympathetic to the resistance - are no longer doing something acceptable like reading the sanitised Fairfax or Murdoch reports, but actively trying to find out different sides of the story. They could be suspected of a crime far worse than looking at websites during work hours.

Kim now concedes it may have have been a beat-up (naughty Julia and MSM), despite her own description: “the ridiculous proposition that employers should be able to access employees’ emails …”

Perhaps those who put blogging in the vanguard of a media revolution where ‘citizen journalists’ will bury the ‘gatekeepers’ in the MSM would do well to avoid the appearance of slavishly recycling their product and compounding their errors.

Can you provide a link to this ‘announcement’ please bilko?

“The only pressure to formalise the kind of snooping that Ken Lovell is happy to be subjected to as an ‘agent’ (shouldn’t that be ‘vassal’?)”

If an employer observes the work of an employee it’s known as ’supervision’, not ’snooping’. Using email and the internet is an essential component of many people’s work so employers observe it as part of the supervisory process. I really don’t understand all the righteous outrage. Of course employees don’t have the right to privacy about how they do their work. They’re required to comply with organisational policies and procedures and their work will be monitored to ensure that they are complying. That’s what supervision is.

“I’d imagine that the major reasons want the right to access employees email would be concerns over things like corporate espionage or corruption and for situations where there is harassment in the workplace”

Great goddlemighty employers want the right to read workers’ emails to make sure they’re doing their jobs properly. Why is that so hard for people to understand?