It appears that there was monitoring going on that shouldn’t have been.”įederal workers see a banner whenever they log into their computers telling them that they have “no reasonable expectation” of privacy. “Nobody’s reading anybody’s e-mail here,” said Rob Carey, the Defense Department’s principal deputy chief information officer. But officials defend the push for more aggressive surveillance, noting that the federal workforce is more mobile and wired than ever - and more vulnerable to leaking sensitive information by accident or design.
#Spector website monitor software#
Among other concerns, they say they are alarmed that the government has monitored federal workers - including the FDA scientists, starting in 2010 - when they use Gmail, Yahoo or other personal e-mail accounts on government computers.Īlthough the FDA has said it acted out of concern that the scientists were improperly sharing trade secrets, the scientists have argued in a lawsuit that they were targeted because they were blowing the whistle on what they thought had been an unethical review process.Īt least two other agencies, the Transportation Security Administration and the Federal Maritime Commission, are under congressional scrutiny for seeking and using employee monitoring software that critics say is intrusive.įederal agencies generally decline to elaborate on their monitoring practices or what activity might trigger them to closely watch an employee’s communications. The stepped-up monitoring is raising red flags for privacy advocates, who have cited the potential for abuse. “Now you can put everything on a little USB thumb drive.” “It used to be, to get all of an agency’s records out you needed a truck,” said Jason Radgowsky, director of information security and privacy for District-based Tantus Technologies, which evaluates monitoring systems for the Federal Aviation Administration, the Export-Import Bank and the National Institutes of Health. Although only a portion of the money - the amount is not specified - was spent on monitoring for insider threats, industry experts say virtually every arm of the government conducts some form of sophisticated electronic monitoring. But now, prompted by the WikiLeaks scandal and concerns over unauthorized disclosures, the government is secretly capturing a far richer, more granular picture of their communications, in real time.įederal workers’ personal computers are also increasingly seen as fair game, experts said.Īgencies outside the field of intelligence spent $5.6 billion in fiscal 2011 to safeguard their classified information with hardware, software, personnel and other methods, up from $4.7 billion in fiscal 2010, according to the Information Security Oversight Office. Government workers have long known their bosses can look over their shoulder to monitor their computer activity. Federal contracting data, however, show that SpectorSoft has multiple government contracts for its monitoring software. The Florida-based company says it does not disclose information about its clients. “Every activity, in complete detail,” SpectorSoft’s Web site says about its best-selling product, Spector 360. It could even track an employee’s keystrokes, retrieve files from hard drives or search for keywords. It could snap screen shots of their computers. It could be programmed to intercept a tweet or Facebook post. The software, sold by SpectorSoft of Vero Beach, Fla., could do more than vacuum up the scientists’ e-mails as they complained to lawmakers and others about medical devices they thought were dangerous. When the Food and Drug Administration started spying on a group of agency scientists, it installed monitoring software on their laptop computers to capture their communications.
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