“IT is always watching you”

The premise that IT is watching you isn't *untrue*, but it does kind of misrepresent things. In every organization I've ever been a part of, we've always had big brother systems that monitor employees. The best/most common example of this is web filtering technology. While for the most part, we are blocking most NSFW materials, there are always things that skirt classification by vendors and we aren't going to catch immediately if at all. This means that some sort of human, at least right now, would need to physically see questionable content come across the content filters and analyze it... but that's the rub. Typically, at least in most IT groups I've been in, no one has the cycles to just sit there and review content filter logs. Even the people that are assigned to web filtering duties as their main jobs cannot possibly be expected to review EVERY destination the user base visits. If you have dedicated content filter employees, you most likely have a user population in the 1000s. If every user is generating like a gig of traffic per day, it's IMPOSSIBLE to review it all. Another example of this I like to use from an anecdotal standpoint is very early on in my career I was responsible for our BES server at one of my first jobs (Blackberry Enterprise Server). Once we got the server up and running and had a few weeks of people migrated onto it, my boss and I sat down to review some settings and we found a flat text file that was pretty big on the server itself. It also appears like it rolled over every few days once it got to a certain size. Out of curiosity my boss opened it up and it revealed recorded SMS messages and the first message was a VP texting a manager in a different facility sexually explicit messages. The manager was not the VP's spouse. My boss instantly closed the text file and turned to me and said: > It's best if we never open this file or allow people to know it exists. In the event that something happens we can look at it but if we see something in this file and we don't act on it, we can get in trouble. Whatever you do, don't open these files unless I ask you to in the future. Just because IT records it, doesn't mean we have the bandwidth to be actionable towards it.