IT Guy quietly deletes illicit files off employee's work computer, they complain and out themselves

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    Font - Posted by u/Eldon42 22 hours ago Boss applies policy, employee gets mad, CEO rips employee a new one. MOC Back in the early 2000s I was working for a local council in New Zealand. If you're not aware, NZ has a central govt, and a series of local areas around cities or rural boundaries, each run by an elected Mayor and Council. The day to day business is, of course, done by employees in a typical business structure.
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    Font - One of the things about this is that all computer systems are regarded as being "owned" by the council, and kinda-sorta by the populace. It a member of the public wants to see what's on the computers, they can make a request under the Official Information Act, and see pretty much anything, except private data. (Private data being defined by the Privacy Act as basically names, addresses, birth dates, phone numbers, etc.) Also working in the council offices was a small business, that had an
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    Font - Thing is, the Small Business leased (this is important) their computers from the council. The small I.T. team (three people, including me) built and supplied those machines. We owned the software that was on them, and they were connected to the internal council network. This meant they were subject to the same local govt and council policies as the rest of us. Periodically, we in I.T. would clean out large files. (Early 2000s, when storage was expensive, and we were limited due to budget,
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    Font - Now, the staff were fully aware of this, and knew to keep personal files to a minimum. If we, during a purge, found large personal files, we could delete them at our discretion. During this time we found some... videos... on an SB employee's machine. It was praphic, and not the nice kind of porneither. The words "f and apply. Because this violated council policy in oh-so-many ways, we deleted it quietly.
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    Font - The employee in question complained, claiming we had removed "personal" files. (I never saw the videos, happily, but my understanding is that he wasn't in them. They were stuff he had downloaded.) We pointed at the policy. He went to the CEO and complained.
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    Font - The CEO came to us. My boss had figured this might happen (the employee in question was an... interesting... guy), and showed the CEO one of the videos. Which was on the backups, just in case we deleted something we shouldn't and had to restore it. (We were good enough at our jobs that we never had to do that, but better safe than sorry.) I wasn't there when it happened, but by all accounts the CEO hauled the employee and the employee's boss (boss of the SB) to an out-of- hearing location
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    Font - FYI, we would regularly block psites. But, being the early 2000's, new ones popped up all the time. Unless an employee tried to access them, we probably didn't know they existed. It's not that we were prudes, it's just that most staff weren't stupid enough to browse that stuff at work.
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    Font - mhkohne 22 hr. ago Honestly, anyone dumb enough to complain about their p being deleted from a work computer should probably lose their job on the basis of being a freaking idiot. Vote Reply Share cat_like_sparky 22 hr. ago Legit, this isn't someone that should be anywhere near a government agency lol Vote Reply Share
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    Font - CoderJoe1 +3.21 hr. ago I worked for a large corp in the US in the early 2000s. All of our laptops were loaded with a default Windows image our IT dept had made. I'm guessing one of the IT guys used his own machine for the image because the first thing I did when I received my newly imaged laptop was delete all the p from the internet explorer cab files. I showed my boss and his boss. Not sure what happened, but surely somebody got chewed out. ↑ Vote Reply Share
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    Font - jackoneilll 22 hr. ago Late 90s, early 2000's, I had to monitor the companies shiny new internet T1 for people browsing pO. Only two people did, the president/ceo and the vp (small company, just the one). My boss just shrugged, nothing we could do about that. Vote ↓ Reply Share
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    Font - Upvoter_NeverDie +2 - 21 hr. ago Reminds me of my duty of having to browse for p on a US Navy aircraft carrier's network when I was part of the IT security division. The things I looked at were...diverse and varied, to say the least. Vote Reply Share
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    Font - ChiTownBob +2 22 hr. ago I'm suspecting this guy was a crony of some kind. The utter entitlement mentality of this employee tells me this. Any ordinary employee would have been fired on the spot for that. Vote Reply Share ... Eldon42 OP 21 hr. ago edited 21 hr. ago He was a specialist on 100k+ salary. (100k in NZ at that time would be about 50k U.S.D.) He was one of only two people in the office who was certified in AutoCAD (again, at the time, a very prestigious thing), and his knowledge

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