If You Can't Block'em - Track'em

Last month we told you about the city's attempt to block EyeOnAlbuquerque.com and MarioBurgos.com (read it here). Now our Eyes tell us that the city is taking another approach. Apparently, too much of the city's behind the scenes dirty laundry is showing up on our lovable little website in the form of anonymous posts. So, the city has decided to install tracking software that will allow them to determine who's posting what using city owned computers and gateways.

First of all, we don't see anything illegal about the city installing and using tracking software on computers owned by the city in order to track what employees are doing using city equipment and presumably on city time. In our opinion, it's really no different than placing tracking devices on city vehicles; it may be creepy and Orwellian, but not illegal.

However, (you knew this was coming) since the city is essentially recording the content being generated by their computers and subsequently being posted on EyeOnAlbuquerque.com, they are creating an electronic record of that employee's activities; that record would be no different than any other electronic correspondence.

Emails the most popular type of computer generated correspondence, are considered part of the public record and can be the target of a Freedom of Information Request. Therefore, if the city is recording data that indicates what Internet sites an employee is visiting and the comments being posted by that employee on a specific Internet site, those records should be public and subject to a FOIR.

We'd love to get our Eyes on where the boys on the 5th and 11th floors are spending their time and our money. But, we'd wager that those computers would be conveniently left off the list of computers to be tracked; similar to the recent email system "crash" that wiped out a number of emails shortly after Marty's Minions Barry Bitzer and Greg Payne got caught with their hand in the electronic cookie jar (Heath Haussamen - read it here). These yahoos ought to learn that getting rid of computer records is really not an easy thing to do and creating even more just to try and ferret out dissenters is probably an unwise course of action.