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CNN Live Today

Watching What You Type

Aired May 31, 2002 - 12:58   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
CAROL LIN, CNN ANCHOR: You might want to watch what you type in those e-mails at work. Big Brother, AKA the boss, may be watching.

CNN's James Hattori reports on the growing trend of e-mail monitoring.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JAMES HATTORI, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): If you work on a computer, get used to it. There's no such thing as private e-mail on a company system.

SHARI STEELE, ELECTRONIC FREEDOM FOUNDATION: Legally, they are not required to tell you if they are monitoring the e-mail. Legally, the equipment that you are using when you are at work belongs to your employer. And, therefore, the employer can do whatever they want to with the equipment.

JEFF SMITH, CHAIRMAN & CEO, TUMBLEWEED: Well, it's not "1984." It's 2002. And, yes, this is Big Brother.

HATTORI: Jeff Smith should know. His firm, Tumbleweed, makes e- mail-monitoring software used by 100 of the Fortune 500 corporations.

SMITH: You are getting a look behind the scenes here, I suppose.

HATTORI: Companies can customize the software to identify senders and scan for keywords that send up a red flag.

SMITH: And so here we could say, let's look in the subject line for any message that includes any combination of the following words.

HATTORI (on camera): And you can dictate the words?

SMITH: Sure.

HATTORI (voice-over): You could also choose from a set of keywords associated with, say, viruses or unsolicited e-mail, spam.

SMITH: "Absolutely free": guaranteed, basically, that it's going to be a spam message.

HATTORI: Once a policy is set, the company determines what happens next: Quarantine the e-mail for review by a human, divert, or the euphemistic drop.

SMITH: We refer to the big bit bucket in the sky.

HATTORI (on camera): So, how common is e-mail monitoring? Well, according to an industry survey last year, nearly 47 percent of large corporations reviewed and stored e-mail messages, three times more companies than in 1997. What can't be quantified is the number of e- mail messages mistakenly screened out. This is a memo that somebody in our company got. And it's completely innocuous.

(voice-over): We showed Smith an e-mail that got bounced back to the sender by his software: a memo arranging a meeting for a charity fund-raiser. It did have dollar signs and financial company names.

SMITH: And so it could have been it was kicked out for compliance violation.

HATTORI (on camera): The program thought it talking about a business deal.

SMITH: Right. Or, alternatively, the software could have concluded that it was spam.

HATTORI (voice-over): Legitimate concerns and a hard line administered by software.

James Hattori, CNN, San Francisco.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

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