Webster’s defines Big Brother as “an omnipresent, seemingly benevolent figure representing the oppressive control over individual lives exerted by an authoritarian government.” Big Brother has its roots in George Orwell’s novel 1984. Today, the term has been misappropriated to describe everything from legitimate crime-fighting to surveillance cameras to corporate e-mail and network usage monitoring.
Companies providing Internet access to their employees must ensure that the Internet is used in a manner that’s conducive to business. They must prevent employees from wasting their day away on things like Internet pornography and music downloading. This is not the “oppressive control” of Orwell’s Big
Brother.
In 1984, the government oppressed its citizens via mind and information control. This could never happen in the United States. U.S. government agencies are widely decentralized and isolated. Just getting the networks within a single federal agency unified is a daunting task; getting all of the agencies to have a single unified data sharing mechanism is a pipe-dream. Look at it this way: the US Department of Defense has more networks than some countries have computers.
Most businesses aren’t concerned about what employees do on their own time. However, they don’t want an employee’s personal interests to disrupt the efficacy of their corporate networks, or create legal problems for them. Companies must perform due diligence so as not to find themselves on the receiving end of a lawsuit resulting from inappropriate Internet usage.
Thus, companies are using monitoring and forensics software to analyze Internet usage and user behavior. Some people object to this, claiming that Corporate America is turning into Big Brother thanks to access control, Web filtering and Web analysis software. But comparing a totalitarian regime under which a devious thought or action was punished in cruel and deadly fashion, to a company that seeks to use its corporate IT assets effectively, is ludicrous.
Companies that have invested large amounts in their information systems have a complementary and unassailable right to ensure that their systems are used for the purposes for which they were procured. Protection of corporate computing is an obligation of sound management, not an emulation of Big Brother.
When Orwell wrote of Big Brother in his book, he was describing a society in which the government was seeking to carry out mind control to achieve the ends of a dictatorial and totalitarian government. When businesses use access control or Web analysis software tools, they aren’t telling their employees how to think or how to act, they are simply seeking to assure that corporate information technology be used for the business purpose for which it was intended.