thomas%mvac23.uucp@udel.edu (Thomas Lapp) (09/25/90)
This is a summary/paraphrase of an article which appeared in
{Information Week} in the 18 June 90 issue. It was the cover article
in the magazine that week.
Abstract: A question of privacy: Alana Shoars says she was
fired from Epson when she questioned management
about its reading of electronic messages between
employees. She has filed suit. The case may be
the first legal test of electronic mail privacy
and it raises issues that have wide ramifications
for corporate E-mail use.
(From the front cover of the magazine).
Alana Shoars, who was the electronic mail administrator for Epson
America Inc., was fired from Epson for wanting to know why her
supervisor was printing out employees' electronic mail messages. But
the way it was done, and what happened as a result are the interesting
parts.
In March 1989, Shoars was hired on (for $36,000/year) as an office
systems programmer and analyst. In her job, she was responsible for
in-house electronic mail and their link to MCI Mail. However, in
October, she came to believe that her supervisor was reading other
employees' messages. When she questioned her supervisor about it, she
was told that "it is none of your business" (despite the fact that
e-mail administration *was* her business). Soon after asking him
about it, she claims that Robert Hillseth, Epson's data communications
manager, began to monitor *her* messages.
According to the article, she was fired soon after an incident in
which she sent an e-mail message to a colleague, Dick Flanagan, asking
how to get a personal MCI Mail account so that she could work from
home. Apparently, she had already asked this of Hillseth, who had
denied her request. A few days later, on January 25, 1990, she was
fired for "gross misconduct and insubordination". She was led out of
the building by armed guards, and local police were waiting for her to
frisk her for what they were told was an employee with a gun.
The article leads off with the transcript of a call placed to the
Torrance, CA police from an Epson mailroom employee:
"Dispacher: Do you know what she was being terminated for?
Stone: It is speculation... absenteeism and speculation of
theft..."
Dispacher: Okay.
Stone: ...and erratic behavior. She said that she has a gun and
that she was going to come back and wipe everybody out.
Dispacher: Okay. All right. I'll send a unit out there."
No gun was found, and Shoars was not charged (Epson won't discuss the
police call incident). Shoars says that the bit with the police was
meant to intimidate her. When others in the company heard about this,
they were upset as well. Dick Flanagan, who was communications
software manager in Santa Clara, quit in protest. He said that he was
under the impression that e-mail was being monitored in Torrance, and
they were in the process of resolving the issue when Alana was fired.
Shoars challenged Epson to claim unemployment benefits and a judge
ruled in her favor. "Her actions cannot be considered misconduct,"
according to the judge.
Experts are saying that what she did next will be the first legal test
of e-mail privacy. Shoars has filed wrongful discharge and invasion
of privacy action against Epson, but Epson says that the charges are
without merit and not related to the issue of e-mail privacy.
According to Hillseth, he was checking the systems audit and error
logs in order to track down a problem with message addressing. Alana
responded that it is not necessary to read messages to do that.
Michael Cavanagh, executive director of the Electronic Mail
Association in Arlington, VA, comments, "What is the level of privacy
that should be expected in the corporate environment?" His belief is
that privacy laws about corporate paper mail and telephone
conversations should extend to e-mail as well.
Epson refuses comment on the situation while it is in litigation, but
said that they have a policy to not monitor e-mail. They claim to
only look at messages which are mis-directed or at the request of an
employee (who might be out of the office, for example).
Lee Cheaney, the former director of quality leadership within Epson
(he was laid off in a corporate downsizing which removed 150 Epson
employees), says that the company is trying to save their corporate
a**, but that Shoars is in the right on this one.
Shoars, however, has a long road ahead on this case. The privacy of
e-mail has not been tested before, and most people just assume that
monitoring of e-mail is just Not Done. Shoars believes that no one
has the right to monitor e-mail messages. The problem, according to
Walter Ulrich (a founding member of the Electronic Mail Association),
is that monitoring of e-mail is so easy and so risk free. He feels
that companies with good employee relations would not monitor e-mail
any more than they would rifle through someone's desk. Those people
who would are small-minded and cowardly, he says. Most experts agree
with Ulrich on this point.
Contrary to the picture that Epson painted, Alana Shoars is not a
gun-toting crazy. She is 32 years old, has associate degrees in
mathematics and chemistry as well as law enforcement and a B.S. in
geology from Cleveland State University (1985). According to John
Blank (of Cleveland State, and Alana's boss for a year after her
graduation), she was very trustworthy. She had keys to his office and
desk. She was also aware of the privacy of the PROFS system which ran
at the university.
At her next job, with a management consulting firm in L.A., the same
thing applied: e-mail was private. Same with her next job at Cal
State Long Beach, where she was an e-mail administrator.
Her job at Epson included responsibility for supporting and training
over 700 people on H-P's DeskManager messaging software and to learn
how to access the newly installed MCImail gateway. While at Epson,
e-mail usage nearly doubled from 48% to 80% use (due to the popularity
of the MCI Mail link).
Alana claims that e-mail is not the only type of communication that
Epson tampers with. With the help of some others, she had several
hundred buttons with the slogan "Bring Alana Back" made up and sent
them to Epson employees by first class mail. However, they never made
it past the Epson mail room, she claims. Flanagan (who was assisting
Shoars) claims that Gary Le Monte (an Epson employee relations
manager) had all of the envelopes intercepted in the mailroom,
collected, picked up and destroyed. The Shoars suit also names Le
Monte as a co-defendant.
The final part of the article goes into some discussion of the law in
the case of e-mail privacy. HR 2168 (the Consumers and Workers
Privacy Act -- pending in committee) has been submitted to try to
address this issue. But it is more intended for addressing monitoring
of telephone conversations rather than e-mail. But legal experts say
that it shouldn't matter the medium. So far only the telephone medium
has been tested and the results were that monitoring is okay if there
are legitimate business reasons, but as soon as it can be determined
that the conversation is personal in nature, they are supposed to hand
up immediately.
The question is whether or not this can be done electronically. How
do you "hang up" on an e-mail note? Some say it cannot be done,
although others say it is very easy to do. An example was a case
where a company's president thought that there might be abuse of the
e-mail system. The MIS director was asked to investigate. So a
program was written which extracted only the subject line and didn't
collect info on author or destination.
The consensus of many of the views expressed in the article was that
regardless of the situation with Epson, companies should have their
MIS departments come up with a corporate policy -- which is explictly
stated -- in place *before* some problem comes up.
tom
internet : mvac23!thomas@udel.edu or thomas%mvac23@udel.edu (home)
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uucp : {ucbvax,mcvax,psuvax1,uunet}!udel!mvac23!thomas
Location : Newark, DE, USAcmoore@brl.mil (VLD/VMB) (09/26/90)
Without further comment here, please be reminded that in the U.S. mail, there are guidelines as to what can be opened. (E.g., the rules of the dead letter office.)