Cameras Came to the Newsroom
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
- If an employer wishes to use CCTV in the workplace, the ICO must be notified as to why they intend to use it. This is part of the registration process for a data controller under the DPA. An employer cannot then use the information collected for any other reason. For example, if the organisation is using CCTV to monitor crime, it cannot then use it to monitor staff. Employers should, before using surveillance cameras, carry out an impact assessment, decide if alternatives are possible and only go ahead if the use of cameras meets a legitimate aim.
- Staff must be informed that they may be recorded and where cameras are located. To make this undisputable the employer should use clear and visible signs.
- Levels of CCTV surveillance in work must be proportionate to the reasonable expectation of privacy. In certain areas with a higher level of expected privacy, such as near toilets, changing rooms, kitchen and break areas, it is unlikely to be acceptable to have cameras.
Maintaining integrity in these areas is essential. Employers need to be aware that staff can request to see the recordings kept of them by making a subject access request, and the data must be provided no longer than 40 days after a request is received. "
It seems that the UK law is reasonable. (At least for a country that has a high level of surveillance)
>Employers need to be aware that staff can request to see the recordings kept of them by making a subject access request
The second kind of undermines the interest sought to be protected by the first. I can imagine nefarious reasons for wanting to see the same frames of footage that you happen to be in.
What function does this access serve anyway?
Oversight
Plus it create a terrible working culture. The work place feels not part of my social life anymore. Why would I feel motivated to do better ? Do be part of a mission ? To feel some meaning ? I'm not doing my part anymore, I'm doing my time.
Cameras on the parking ? Sure.
Cameras on the shops and other places receiving customers ? Ok.
Cameras on areas with risky data or money ? Make sense.
But keep the cameras outside of my freaking office. I've quit for less than that.
- You already have little expectation of privacy at work. Your computer has a sysadmin account for the company, and probably not a sysadmin account for you. Your Springsteen tickets are logged and potentially cached in the printer's memory. At most places, coworkers can see what you're doing in person. So there's no strong reason to expect more crackdown on occasional personal use of work time/resources than there has been in the past.
- There are easy options (especially for people who get an NYT salary) for private work and private computing: doing things at home, using your cell phone (not on the corporate network, no corporate login, and probably too small to see on the cameras), taking a quick break to a nearby cafe, printing your tickets at FedEx, etc. (Many of those are much more anonymous than possible at work, e.g., leave your phone at your desk, email to printandgo@fedex.com from a throwaway account, and pay in coins.)
- The stated rationale—responding to violent attacks—makes sense, is quite worthwhile individually in expectation (even a slight reduction in your chance of getting killed is quite valuable), and if believed implies insufficient staffing to effect a panopticon. There's probably just one security guard downstairs, at most.
- There's other personally beneficial reasons to want cameras at work, e.g., helping you (whichever side you find yourself on!) in harassment claims. In particular I'd actively want low-resolution cameras, enough to identify people but not enough to read standard-sized text on paper or screen, covering every office or conference room with a door that closes.
My own workplace has cameras everywhere other than the bathrooms. We're told this at orientation, and also told that nobody is actively watching them. This seems totally fine to me. If there were security cameras in the bathrooms / privacy rooms / etc., or in my apartment, or in hotel rooms, or anything else, that would be quite different.
- allowing people to do minor personal tasks at work is expected in a professional career such as journalism. It’s not a sweatshop, peoples’ productivity doesn’t neatly correlate with hours worked anyway. And you’re expected to be readily available outside of work hours anyway, so this should cut both ways.
- shooting happen within just a few minutes and the effect of cameras is debatable, especially if there is no armed and trained security.
- The NYT is a sort of high value target. I would not expect to get into their offices without proper ID.
- Is there some epidemic of false harassment claims everyone is worried about? As far as I know there was one case that had consequences at the Times (Glenn Thrush) and he admitted to the behavior. Also like 90% of harassment is verbal, which cameras don’t capture. The rest seems to happen in hotel rooms and bars, which these cameras also don’t address.
Nobody cares about a few personal tasks at work but it's important to have video evidence when something serious occurs. And yes there are false harassment claims, and having even a single case avoided because of footage is worth it for both the person and company involved.
Really? I'd never agree to that. It's definitely not universal, certainly not tolerated in France for example I'm sure.
(There might be a problem that people are at work too much of their lives, or that people should work for themselves or worker-owned coops instead of for bosses, or something, but those seem like independent problems; trying to solve symptoms of those problems and ignoring the underlying issue doesn't seem productive.)
Precisely because allowing people to do minor personal tasks at work is the norm in the industry, I think there is little risk that cameras will prevent people from doing minor personal tasks. Mine is the same: I feel quite comfortable checking personal email / IM / Hacker News on my personal laptop at work despite having a camera somewhere looking at me and easily being able to tell when I'm not looking at my work screen. Basically, I think that if they wanted to crack down, there are easier ways to do that than cameras, so they don't, and cameras won't make them decide to start cracking down.
And to be clear, I'm much more interested in video evidence to back up harassment claims than to deny them. I'm of the opinion that a lot goes unreported because complainants know there isn't much evidence. But you make a good point about lots of it happening off-site.
Shootings tend to happen relatively quickly (though often longer than people think the Virginia Beach shooter wasn't contained for 15 minutes), but they tend to have very long and potentially dangerous sweeps to clear the area. You don't want a response team to accidentally shoot a guy holding a stapler or something.
The NY Times building is a single block from Times Square where there are enough heavily armed response teams to depose several island governments 24/7. Also being in the area somewhat regularly there are regular and counterterrorism police directly in front and across the street often during daylight hours.
The Times is kind of the exception that proves the rule. If you aren't literally feet from an armed response that can bring down everything from an armored car to a helicopter (only rumored, but repeatedly so) it probably won't do as much good. In their particular situation though, I suspect it could save lives if a rare event occurs. Which is always a hard thing to balance.
Consider the case where a supervisor makes unwanted physical contact with a subordinate. I wouldn't be so quick to assume that the company would hand over evidence to the subordinate if s/he made the claim. If they act in the best interest of the company, they would delete the footage and reprimand the superior. What company would hand over evidence that could cost them an expensive harassment suit?
Cameras can absolutely be a liability [1]:
> a partner at a big law firm came up afterward to say that his firm had taken out the security cameras in its stairwells. “We picked up so much sexual activity on the cameras, after midnight, that it was a liability to have the videotape in our possession
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-04-16/the-truth...
Seriously, though. Even when I was a cooperative engineering student (ie. low 20's ages, lot's of partying, everybody pretty far from home for 3 months), people weren't fucking in the stairwells. Good grief.
Most of the places I worked, I generally have difficulty coming up with a single person who I would even want to have sex with.
As you apparently don't have relevant experience, you seem to be unable to add or subtract authenticity to the claims.
I suspect an uncharitable answer is: "One or more of our senior partners likes to accost people in the stairwells."
A more charitable explanation is that it could be a more "New York" thing in that people are at the office, drunk, late for various reasons (office parking is a good spot to park the car for late events; hit the office before riding mass transit for 30-40 minutes for a pit stop; etc.)
In an environment like that when you have thousands of people who often find themselves working late and having no other outlet, of course stuff goes on in the office.
While she was there a partner was caught on camera with one of his secretaries in the company pool.
“Nobody watching” is meaningless. Amazon offers facial recognition as a service, and many tools exist to identify and classify data in video. The computer is watching, and it will be configured to see whatever is in the interest of the folks controlling the machine.
I know that's the case some places, but I've never worked anywhere where that was the case. And that includes a company with 10k employees. It's nowhere near universal.
That is also much less of a restriction than it used to be: Most of us have personal computers on our body most of the time, as you point out.
But expectation of privacy is largely down to how you choose your society to be. Many countries have restrictions on what employers are legally able to do with that access for that reason. E.g. Norway has strict limitations on to what extent employers can even look at your corporate e-mail account without your consent because there is considered to be an extent of expectation of privacy there too, and tries to strike a balance between protecting that and protecting the needs of the employer.
A lot of Norwegian labour law around privacy boils down to whether employees have a legitimate reason for reducing the expectation of privacy, and how to minimize that invasion, rather than accepting that "you already have little expectation of privacy at work" is a valid excuse for eroding it further. Part of the rationale here is that people spend sufficient time at work that it is unrealistic to expect there to be no co-mingling of personal life and work, and so there is a need to create limited spheres of privacy even at work, and it is rare that this conflicts with legitimate employer concerns (and "you should spend 100% of your time exclusively on work tasks" is not considered legitimate) in ways that can't be reasonably resolved.
I find it troublesome how many people don't even question whether or not this kind of erosion of privacy serves legitimate purposes.
> At most places, coworkers can see what you're doing in person.
There is a very different dynamic there, though, which you can easily test: People have different levels of awareness of a person looking in their direction vs. a camera. If I had a manager standing behind me all the time, I'd quit.
A camera is better in some respects (you don't have someone standing there) and worse in some respects (it is actually there all the time and you don't know when someone is looking)
Whether or not it's truly invasive largely boils down to how it is handled. Active monitoring is very different from knowing someone might look at the recordings to look for evidence for in the case of specific types of events, for example.
Most don’t have a sysadmin account for that computer either.
These cameras also had two-way audio, so I would be having a conversation with my co-worker and he would butt into the conversation..through the camera.
I only lasted about 3 months before I quit. There is still an active, private, Facebook group with ex-employees of this company. The boss was so horrible..it's almost like people needed a support group.
We didn't have gigabit broadband back then, therefore whenever the boss was on the cameras the internet went slow. Therefore we always knew that if the internet was slow we had to be on best behaviour.
We never told him how we knew when he was watching or let him know that we knew, it was an office wide open secret amongst us though. Funny times.
The off topic highlight was when a young French girl was being interviewed. I happened to be in earshot and I almost fainted. Straight up she was asked about her plans to start a family. They didn't want to hire someone who might cost them maternity pay down the line, hence the opening question that brazenly got straight into the sexism. She took the job.
I too only lasted three months before I quit.
In France, you can lie to that question without legal repercussions, even when currently pregnant, and refusing to hire someone for the reason you stated (and a long list of other reasons) would be illegal.
Does this kind of thing exist in the US, even if only in some states ?
In my company our product person was working remotely. For a short stint he was elevated to head of engineering, even though he had absolutely no idea about how engineers work. It was around that time that he presented the idea of a webcam pointed at us with open audio all day, so that he could be in the loop.
We quickly shot down that idea, together with his recommendation to "have trello constantly open in one of our monitors".
During his stint the complete engineering team including me practically evaporated, only one or two people stayed on... He's still going on, as he's friends with the CEO.
This anecdote is probably a bit off topic to the article as this was not for "security", but it goes to show how many people are so open to the idea of cameras to solve their little problems.
What they didn't take into account was the number of people that go in and out of the building every single day. Imagine a 12 story building with at least a hundred people on each floor on the average day. And they had to be funnelled through a single turnstile. Then there is the elevators.
One morning, everything was activated at once. The line backed all the way outside the building and wrapped around. You could spend up to twenty minutes to get into the building. Then once you are in, you have to wait for the elevators. You have to scan your keycard to get to your floor. Now try doing that with 30 people in the elevator and they all want to go to a different floor.
"Can you press 11 for me?"
They couldn't, because their card only works for the third floor.
In less than a week they shut everything down and went back to the designing board. They had to rebuild the reception to add 4 turnstile. The elevators keycard readers were never reactivated again.
I started taking stairs and never looked back.
Of course, during high-traffic hours people just hold the door for each other, defeating the purpose.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBERTNSuZR8 is an interesting talk on the subject.
A FAANG did this in a European country and it's amazing to see the backlogged line after things like pre-determined fire drills.
Took to waiting for 30 minutes because I didn't create the problem but I was getting paid, either way, so, why should I have to "fight the crowd" to achieve the same goal, which comes with more stress and effort, when I could simply do it on my own terms?
For the elevators, I just followed someone out from the nearest level above, and took the stairs down.
Fire code designated their (all?) level as a “crossover” and required it to allow entry from the stairwell.
Makes sense: you could enter a stairwell, but be unable to exit through that one.
The management told the staff they were only going to be on after working hours, to catch thieves. I noticed a week or two later that some young, male, technical members of staff, including the one who did the installation, were in the server room watching staff on the monitors, laughing at people’s appearances and talking about the sexual acts they would like to perform with some of those visible on the monitor.
I reported this to management, who said they’d fix it. A week later, the same was happening. Again I reported, again it carried on. Then I saw that (male) management were using the web viewer from their desks to watch the women in the office (selecting particular views) from the comfort of their desks with monitors towards the windows. Which are reflective, so they weren’t as private as they perhaps thought.
I told one of the women concerned. She complained to the same management - they told her they were off during work hours (which they weren’t) and nothing happened.
I kept spotting them sitting watching the staff from their cosy corners, so I logged into the system (it wasn’t hard to find the credentials) and reconfigured it so it wouldn’t appear on the network any more.
It took them a few days to factory reset the box and they were off again. I left shortly afterwards - the general attitude towards employees being one of my main reasons.
If these cameras are hacked, now you can watch someone entering their passwords, working on stories pre-release, communicating with sources, etc.
This makes the CCTV system a very juicy target.
If someone wants to find the source of a leak published at the NYT they probably only need to hack or seize the DVRs recording those cameras.
I also assume the NYT doesn't meet with sources in their offices (in full sight of everyone from the summer intern to the person restocking the fridge, all of whom you could try to bribe), and instead meets in a crowded public location like a cafe.
(besides, I very much doubt many people leak to the NYT by walking into the office and announcing their presence. They do it online or send things in by mail in the stories I've read)
kept locally and not stored anywhere in the cloud
Perhaps the cameras and DVRs are on a physically isolated, non-internet connected network ... but I certainly wouldn't bet my life on it even if they told me they were.
> NYT by walking into the office and announcing their presence.
No, but reporters presumably look at work on their notes in places visible to the cameras.
Maybe one day, the security camera footage will be materially useful?
If it's the second, that's ilegal in a lot of countries.
At least in Europe that's the law. Besides that, you must have visible warning signs to let people know there are cameras recording them, and you also have to notify the national entity that's responsible for data protection that you will have "X" cameras (image, audio, or both) for the "Y" purpose.
- For security reasons: to protect people and assets;
- For monitoring: to control your employees activity.
Picking a ridiculous example: if your boss tells you that you're spending too much time talking/doing a task/eating, because he as been watching you via security cameras, he will be in a lot of trouble.
I’m against using vague threats like terrorism to increase surveillance, but the two are not equivalent.
The difference is that the manager can't see everywhere at once.
I'm reminded of the famous office scene from Terry Gilliam's Brazil: [1]
and also of the Panopticon[2], which was just a Romantic fantasy of Jeremy Bentham's when he dreamed it up in the 1790's, but which has become reality in the 20th and 21st centuries, with the advent of supermax prisons, schools, factories, and offices, with their omnipresent surveillance.
Bentham described the panopticon as "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind". It's depressing and frightening that there are still many advocates of such oppression.
And nobody ever watches all of the security camera footage.
¹ Granted, that you're free to replace with another or try to start your own!
If that workplace is a prison or sweatshop, yes.
If it's a place people with dignity work, then that shouldn't be the case, and for the most part of history, it wasn't.
At the very least they would have had something to write about, because this article is lukewarm at best and feels like a complainy blog post.
Also, getting fired at a news paper for blacking out the cameras in the vicinity of your desk as a protest because a new security chief wants to feel important is probably a blessing in disguise.