Notts County Council sprays £82k on PC smut trawl As Nottinghamshire County Council gets ready to issue hundreds of redundancy notices to staff in an effort to plug a £30m gap in its finances, it is also spending six-figure sums on an anti-porn crusade. The Council has so far owned up to spending £82,000 with external suppliers in their hunt for "inappropriate" material. It …
..I worked for a 30,000+ employer who did an audit of it's copious network drives and it's staff Internet habits. They were ready to bring down the hammer on all the naughty miscreants!
Until.
It turned out, as a percentage of staff, senior managers were by far the worst offenders.
That report never saw the light of day......
Fail-o-rama!
"PCs belonging to individual councillors are scheduled as next on the list to be checked."
So, roll the checks out on the minions, catch a few and create internal awareness, then check the high ranking people - after they've had plenty of time to 'sanitise' their PCs. Brilliant!
From what I've read (a long time ago), these checking routines search for groups of pink(ish) pixels. Given that it's Nottingham, there may be some coalminers there who would be immune from these checks.
Whilst my first response was "wasting money on this when sacking real workers!" I then remembered that these are council workers, the sort of "people" who let NCP charge you to park outside your own house and waste our money on private detectives to spy on you when you try and send your children to the only decent school in the borough.
There is a real ROI argument here, "three members of staff have been sacked, one worker has resigned, four were given warnings, two have been suspended and five are still under investigation"
So, let's take the employment cost (not salary) of each of them to be ~£25k, we have £100k PA already with a potential £125k PA under investigation. Against £82k I call that saving money, now imagine what it will save if they catch some backhander taking senior tory member who sits on the planning committee to make sure his masonic mates get redevelopment grants after paying him off to get planning permission...
Your calculations assume that you don't have to employ someone new to do the job of the person you just sacked.
If you do, you have to actually add to their employment costs, the costs of recruitment, training and the time taken for them to get up to speed, so the actual cost is higher than continuing to employ them, and you still have to add the cost of the witch-hunt.
Of course in the case of a council worker: the chances are probably low that everyone working in a council actually works much over 50%, and therefore the chance of needing to replace the person you sacked is also low...
How does Sacking People make the Workload go away? The staff will be replaced with addional training costs. This is NOT a Money saving exercise!! This is an HR twat trying to justify their existance and spend a budget. Cuts should fall where they save the most, cut the twats who waste tens of thousands uncovering 10 minute misdemeanours. (on 25k PA, 10 minutes = £2)
It just distributes it to a more realistic number of staff, perhaps if we can plant pr0n on, ooh, 50% of council staff's PCs then maybe we'd be getting value for money as the remaining 50% would have to do a proper day's work instead of slying off at 2:30 in the afternoon or disappearing on the sick for months on full pay every year.
Cynical? Nope, I just know a lot of council employees. Skiving knuts the lot of them. And yes, I am jealous.
Paris, never one to lie back and shirk her share of a job..
"We look forward to finding out what Nottinghamshire councillors keep on their PCs."
So would I, but all we're going to find out is what they've *still* got on their PCs despite having been given plenty of warning they're about to be scanned - unlike their less important colleagues, who received no such warning.
Whilst I agree that people in the work place should work, not jerkoff.
Warning #1, then sack the next time anything dodgy appears on their PC.
However, I know most of you will understand this point, as your the primary culprits....
How do you prove that this person placed the smutt on the PC, have you seen how weak 99% of passwords are? Honestly, I do know how wank (pun intended) your passwords are - adding a couple of digits wont help - usually 99 or 69!
Who is to say that their PC was in use by the owner at the time, or that they even knew about any infiltration. If they were sensible, they should have raised this point - no evidence of whom committed the crime would land the council in an employment tribunal.
Having said that, its trivial to prove they were using their PC at the time - monitor their network access, and as soon as smutt downloads begin, send someone round with a camera - and tissues! Job Done .... ewww.
"PCs belonging to individual councilors are scheduled as next on the list to be checked"
i wonder how many copies of windows washer have been sold recently....
to management of Notts CC.
Nott that they'll be telling anyone :p
CAUTION PRON HUNT IN PROGRESS, NOTT BY TECHIES THOUGH!
If you want to see some of the documents released in an FOI request on this subject (not sure if it's exactly the same one), they are over at WhatDoTheyKnow (the URL looks like it's been cut off but it's the full one):
http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/high_levels_of_porn_at_the_counc
I found it quite interesting that in one of reports on the investigation to the 'Corporate Leadership Team', the author refers to the Council as a business a couple of times:
"There are a number of risks to the business that need to be considered..." and "This may therefore have an impact on the business in certain areas."
It's also interesting to see the Business Case and Proposals from iCompli, which is the company which actually sold the PixAlert software to NCC, as they keep on finding new products and services to sell to the Council.
I used to run a council network and by proactive monitoring I knew what traffic was on it, solving problems before they arose. Naturally as a council with an error free network, money could be saved by getting rid of the overpaid(?) technical manager, although how replacing me with 3 people saved money I am not sure.
A couple of years later I was called back as an expert witness in a "porn viewing" case. Talk about a botch up. At least half the time pictures were being viewed, although this act was never actually proven, the accused was actually miles away. This little fact did not deter audit in the least! One other fact was that the screen faced out into the office and no passer by had ever witnessed any display. Needless to say the charge failed, however as mentioned above a simple network alarm and nip round would have solved the problem with no additional costs.
As with this lot, a decent bit of monitoring, a quick talking too and public knowledge (rumour) that someone would be checking PCs and laptops at some point in the near future would have been enough to have located the actual perpetrator and nipped the activity in the bud and when you do that it never blossoms.
in my following companies that was all I did and we never had a problem.
I did try out some expensive monitoring software but the alarm for eastern european housewives turned out to be a Peugeot car owners club home page with a picture of a Peugeot on it. Most disappointing for the hordes of us gathered round to see what tripped the alarm.
Still these people must be doing something right as they have jobs and I can't get one!
Like the old chestnut of the Beeb and some tabloids yelling about the banks wasting a further £20 million of their £60 billion (i dunno the real figures ;) bailout on something-or-other frivolous... until it was pointed out that this was actually about 1/30th of a percent of the total.... we have a similar false outrage going on here.
£30m is to £82 grand as would £300 be to 82p. So you've just had to lay off the student you were originally planning to employ on saturday for the rest of the summer, saving your small time store £300, then spent less than a quid on strictly-speaking unneccessary detergent to clean up the front of the shop and some other bits of hardware that aren't hygiene risks. And the crowd goes wild with indignation...
All the same, guys, if you can't save the googlepron and five knuckle shuffle for hometime, you've either got relationship issues, really bad domestic connectivity or a burning need to see a sex therapist.
Speaking of which.... / ! \
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