They're Watching You.

A roster of office spies with code names SpyAgent, Shadow, Silent Watch and Sentinel have infiltrated the workplace, commandeered your computer and are looking over your shoulder. They aim to sniff out corporate cyberslackers, and by all accounts they won't have trouble finding them -- Canadian employees are surfing the Web at work in droves.

CREDIT: Bruno Schlumberger, For Techweekly Sundara Murthy, CEO of Ottawa's Sigpro Wireless, is an outspoken critic of surfing at work. 'People are spending lots of time on the Internet and it is becoming addictive.' Instant messaging, he says, is a scourge to productivity. 'Chatlines are a disease.'

A recent Ipsos-Reid poll found personal Web surfing is increasingly common. Canadians spend an average of 4.5 hours a week online at work for personal reasons, according to the poll. That's 1.6 billion hours a year. Although the majority of Internet use is legitimate, the jump in personal use -- double that of 2000 -- has caused a surge in computer surveillance.

Paying employees to bid on eBay, shop online, play games, trade stocks or instant-message friends isn't usually a corporate priority. So as the surf-at-work trend has grown, so have strategies to deal with it.

"Companies are getting tougher,'' says Anthony Whitehead, chief technology officer at Ottawa's Bajai Inc., an Internet-monitoring software company. Just three years ago, for example, only 33 per cent of Canadian companies had Internet-use policies. Now, nearly 57 per cent have, Ipsos-Reid found.

Whitehead has seen business boom in the past few years as companies wake up to the fact employees are taking advantage of workplace computers despite widely publicized office Internet policies. "You can create policies,'' Whitehead says, "but those policies are meaningless if you aren't willing to enforce them."

For instance, during an audit of one Ottawa-area organization, Bajai uncovered more than 640,000 hits to adult sites in May 2001 alone. This, at a workplace with an Internet-use policy and fewer than 5,000 employees.

"It makes some jaws drop. A lot of people would like to believe this isn't happening," says Whitehead. "These are all adults, they should know better. They've all signed policies. This shouldn't be happening, but it does."

Not surprising then, that enforcement is on the rise. In 1997, 35 per cent of American companies monitored employee online activity; by 2001, nearly 80 per cent had started Web tracking, according to an American Management Association study. As of 2001, some 14 million U.S. workers -- one in three of the 40 million employees with Internet access -- had their e-mail and Internet use monitored at work, according to a 2001 study by the non-profit group Privacy Foundation. Based on surveillance software sales, an estimated 100 million workers worldwide are monitored, the group reports.

Employees who take personal Internet time at work feel such surveillance erodes trust, not to mention morale. "I think people work better if they feel free to be able to do that kind of thing," says a public library employee who requested anonymity to protect her job.

She admits to spending an hour each day cruising sites like Hotmail.com, Chapters.ca and Epicurious.com, but doesn't think it is a problem. "I would never not be doing work I needed to be doing in order to do stuff for personal gain," she says, "but if I've got a moment in the day that is quiet, I'll go check my e-mail, or go and check for that book I've been meaning to buy, or I'll go find a recipe to make for dinner."

Other workers interviewed for this story say employers have no more right to track personal e-mail than to listen in on personal telephone conversations. If employees are routinely cyberslacking, they say, it's likely the company's fault for not managing properly. "People should be too busy to have oodles of time to surf the Web," said one worker.

But companies counter that even if only a few workers are misusing the Internet, abuse can damage a company's reputation and bottom line.

Corporations can be held liable if employees download illegal material such as child pornography, if they violate copyright, or harass a co-worker via e-mail. In the U.S., for example, Morgan Stanley was sued for $70 million U.S. after racist jokes were circulated on its e-mail system. Last April, an Arizona company paid a $1-million settlement to the recording industry after it allowed employees to swap MP3s. In Ontario, more than 60 O.P.P. officers and Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources staff were investigated in July 2001 for exchanging pornography and racist e-mails on the government's system. Some 40 officers were disciplined, demoted or docked pay, while six ministry employees were fired.

Employers are also worried about staff releasing confidential information on the Internet, either deliberately or accidentally.

Preserving network bandwidth is also a top priority -- large audio and video file downloads slow down the network. Instead of upgrading the system, some employers are downgrading employees' access and blocking such files. That tactic would have been useful at the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency in 2000 when e-mail chain letters holding large files twice crashed the network.

Surf Police

CEOs are responding to this threat to productivity and security. "People are spending lots of time on the Internet and it is becoming addictive," says CEO Sundara Murthy of Ottawa's Sigpro Wireless.

Instant messaging, he says, is a scourge to productivity. "Chatlines are a disease. Many new graduates are addicted to that. We measure our employees' output and productivity so if that suffers we know they are whiling away their time with this."

Upon hiring, his company makes employees agree to a policy which forbids illegal and personal use, but he's aware it still happens. Murthy hasn't felt the need to install monitoring software yet, but he holds a hardline philosophy: companies should use everything in their arsenal to prevent abuse -- from monitoring software to shutting Internet access off entirely. At Sigpro, he's taken a proactive approach. He's put most of the information employees need on the company Intranet so they stay on the internal system which protects against personal surfing and limits exposure to viruses.

ZIM Technologies International employees sign an agreement, and with the help of software, spam, pornography and MP3 sites are blocked and e-mails are scanned for viruses and content. "I'm finding more than 95 per cent of the time it's accidental," says director of Information Services Jamie Larabie of the porn Web hits he sees. "For example, if you go to whitehouse.com instead of whitehouse.gov all of a sudden -- boom! -- you're on a porn site."