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Comment by Mirioron | Hacker News Reader

If the NSA can't keep its employees from abusing their spying tools to spy on their neighbors then what chance does law enforcement have?

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I'm starting to get the feeling that a lot of these jobs, both tech and government, are low key treating non public data access as a perk.

For context, I interviewed with a company that had police videos stored on their systems and were using them for entertainment, to the point of showing me one at the beginning of the interview for grins

This is possibly true at smaller companies, but this kind of thing does not fly at larger tech companies.

I've worked on both sides of that, I think you'd be surprised. I also suspect that it's worse at the TLAs and any organization with access to FBI, license plate and various criminal databases. Obviously CCard databases and stuff are off limits as their use is outright fraud, but stuff like traffic cameras, imaging systems, etc.

I don't know about US, but many European countries have access logging in police and health databases, which checks to see for unwarranted snooping. With actual convictions taking place when someone gets too interested in, say, the behind-the-scenes data of the latest celebrity news.

Many times that are implemented so that IT isn't monitored, and the staff who is monitored can have selective enforcement. This allows for people to be fired for abusing their access when in reality they are being fire for some other action that isn't nearly as PR friendly to state.

> This allows for people to be fired for abusing their access when in reality they are being fire for some other action that isn't nearly as PR friendly to state.

TBH sounds a bit like a conspiracy theory. And for what it's worth, at least in Finland getting caught snooping isn't cause for firing people, the convictions have been fines.

Not true. While it has been pretty rare for anyone to get fired over snooping other people's data, there has been several cases where it has been the basis of firing the employee. Especially the health care sector has been sensitive about snooping, see for example [1], article in Finnish.

[1] https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-7460193

Good if the more serious cases have bigger consequences. I suppose the fines have been for single offences, whereas this linked case was pretty extensive snooping.

The idea that employers will fire you for justifiable reasons when the reality is that they are firing for unjustifiable reasons is far more than simple conspiracy theory. There are numerous cases of people winning discrimination lawsuits because such firings didn't cover up good enough and lawyers were able to prove the actual reasoning. I do not find it unreasonable to think that many more cases weren't caught because the individual either didn't have funds to fight back or tracks were covered well enough the jury wasn't convinced.

Yes, I find it plausible. But you specifically said that this monitoring is often leading to baseless firing. Do you have proof there's a link, are there multiple cases where this was proven? If not, you don't have grounds for claiming that it's often happening in the context of data snooping. That would be just useless speculation of what could happen.

twitter employees have in the past been bragging in a bar about their ability to look at people's DMs and were recorded doing so.

this was verbally joked about as a perk while interviewing for Facebook in 2008, specifically: any engineer could view anyone's profile. i think that's been changed though.

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