Messing with Big Brother

Ever wonder what happens to the stuff you throw away? It’s kind of magical isn’t it? You put stuff in this box, it gets taken away to… Well, you really have no idea unless you are able to follow it all the way to the landfill/incinerator without someone noticing (because if they noticed you following, they’d make sure you saw what they wanted you to see). I thought of this story over the last week as I tossed stuff in the trash. Happy reading…

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Another day, another pile of trash.

Ron sifted through the garbage on the table in front of him. He picked out an interesting drawing that had been crumpled up and tossed there. It was a doodle of different bladed implements being “stabbed” into the very paper they were drawn on by disembodied hands. The paper was bleeding. It appeared that at some point the blades had carved “Bad Paper” into the paper.

Classically trained as a Psychologist, Ron found his job pretty stimulating. Sure he was sifting through trash at a “junk mail” company unbeknownst to it’s employees (reporting his psych evaluations to the CEO) but there was something about the detective work he had to do that he found fascinating.

Ever since the “Big Sister” act of 2013, government regulations stated that Ron could not data mine into the employee’s personal files or computers. In 2010 there was a huge lawsuit from a Microsoft employee against his company for wrongful termination over some “Open Source Manifestos” he had written on his work computer over lunch. These had started as rants jotted into legal pads during many of the horribly meaningless meetings he was forced to attend for six hours a day. His boss found the manifestos, and an investigation was started. His “My Documents” folder on his computer was opened and dug through, as well as his drawer in his file cabinet which was marked “Personal”. Microsoft argued that these things were on company property, and therefore belonged to the company.

The courts disagreed. They said Microsoft was behaving in an Orwellian fashion, and that it’s “Big Brother” tactics of invasively scrutinizing employees were illegal. After a three year legal battle, the courts (in a ruling titled the “Big Sister” Act) decided that companies only had rights to access areas explicitly designated as “work” areas on the employee’s computers, and physical files that were not explicitly marked “personal”. When an employee quit, they were allowed to take home any physical files marked “personal” (after they had been combed over by legal to ensure they did not contain any corporate secrets) and the employee’s computer was to be completely “wiped” after the “work” folders were copied to the central server.

Of course Ron’s company had found ways around this. Junk mail was a very competitive business, and Ron’s company wanted to be sure that there was no under-handed activity happening.

According to the law, anything anyone placed in the “trash” became unclaimed public property. This meant that anything an employee threw into their waste basket at work was fair game for corporate scrutiny, and anything they placed into the “Recycling Bin” on their computer was automatically copied to a secret secure numbered directory on the server corresponding with that employee.

Ron’s job initially started as just going through all of this “trash” and making sure the employee was on the “up and up”. Three employees conspiring to quit and take 30% of the clients with them were immediately identified and fired within the first month of Ron joining the company. Funding was added and Ron’s services expanded to psychoanalysis of employees.

Ron could, with alarming accuracy, diagnose employees and identify “leaders” and “losers” within the company. Placing glass ceilings over, or elevators under, “subjects” rather quickly.

No one realized Ron was doing this. Or no one should have. Then Ron discovered that someone did.

A month ago Ron found some alarming threatening letters in a rather annoying girl’s trash. They were written in all CAPS and were just absolutely insane. They talked about how much they hated the CEO, and how they were plotting to kill him. Ron immediately reported his findings, and she was unceremoniously fired for “tardiness and poor teamwork”.

Then this week Ron found what appeared to be correspondence between one co-worker and a competitor. At first Ron was sure they had another breach, except there was something fishy about it. There was no way this employee could ever have known the things they were saying to the competitor. The correspondence was about a top secret company project in another department un-related to the employee’s. The correspondence indicated that the employee was “selling” secrets to the competition, but Ron happened to have a friend working at the competition, and knew they were in no position to buy, or even use these secrets. In fact, the competition was moving away from junk mail entirely, and as of the fourth quarter would drop it all together. The facts just didn’t add up.

Someone was toying with Ron to get people fired. And if they could fake information to get someone fired, this also meant they could groom their own “trash” to get themselves promoted.

A week ago Ron would have begun psycho-analyzing the blades and the “Bad Paper” lettering in the crumpled doodle he held in his hands. He would have decided that this employee was extremely bored and hated meetings. The “doodle” was on the sort of paper that everyone used to take notes during meetings. Ron would have decided that the person was redirecting their anger about the meetings and transferring it to the paper. Punishing the paper by “killing” it and branding it as “bad”. Ron would have passed this information on to the CEO, who then could evaluate the number of meetings and decide if the person was right, and decrease the meetings, or if the person were wrong, and fire them.

Now Ron wasn’t so sure. Could this be another plant? With someone toying with him, all of his trash was now suspect.