The Logs Don't Lie

2017-07-25

I recall one place where we had Angry-faced MD McAngryFace charge in one evening complaining how productivity was down due to people goofing off and he wanted to see all the web logs and all the internal email traffic so he fire someone.

This was a long time ago, and a smallish firm, so there wasn't any of the monitoring we'd routinely expect now, and the two techies he shouted at didn't really clock the privacy issues.

Anyways, they got everything set up pretty quickly and at the end of the first day uncovered (from the email logs) at least four office romances (one of them a love triangle), a multitude of other naughtiness and (from the web traffic) all kinds of eye-watering stuff, but the cherry was McAngryFace himself had spent most of the day booking prostitutes for his next business trip to Thailand.

The rubber-spined IT manager buried it all and pretended it wasn't "technically possible" to deliver the logs requested with the equipment we had. Got him a budget for new toys, but I reckon blackmail would have been more efficient.

2017-07-26

We had a lovely incident at my former employer. One of the managers was hellbent on seeing all the logs from everyone's machines in the lab I worked in. Quick backstory: Most everyone was on a dual monitor setup, most everyone had FB open on one monitor as a half screen (I had /., but whatever), our tests would take about 3 min to run and it was obvious when they were done.
Manager McManagerface was convinced that because these windows were open that everyone was wasting oodles of time and not working. Even when presented the math of how long each test took and how many tests that meant could possibly be done in a day (12 * [3min exec + 2 min setup] == 60. 12 * 8 == 96, accounting for zero time between tests) you could conceivably do 96 tests per shift: With NO meetings, NO interruptions from McManagerface asking "how's it going", and superhuman levels of reaction to get everything perfect every time, and memorizing the data results to enter while the next test was running, said manager still pressed that the average of high 70's was way too low.

Okay, back to the story... Soooo Manager McManagerface was trying to get IT to hand over everyone's logs. As the most senior tech in the lab I called a confidential contact in IT and told him what was going on. He said he already knew, and that IT had refused the request because it was private information and the manager did not have a valid business justification for it. Manager McManagerface cries to his boss. Boss DeBigBoss pulls some strings, rattles some closeted skeletons, and manages to get everyone's logs for the lab... Including Manager McManagerface's... Who was fired about 3 days later because guess who spent literally 6 hours a day browsing his home security cameras and day trading on some stock platform?

Of course the edict also came down that there was to be NO personal browsing on our machines when in the lab; in spite of the corp acceptable use policy specifically allowing it. Meh, we all switched to our phones shortly.

The Logs Don't Lie

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