How to avoid embarrassing leaks

Fostering good staff morale may prove more effective than tough usage rules

I happened to overhear a conversation between my neighbours the other day. I didn’t get all the details as my listening position ­ standing in the bath, on a chair with my ear cupped to the ceiling ­ did not lend itself to prolonged eavesdropping, but I did get the gist of what was being said.

Apparently, one of their - sorry, I mean our ­ neighbours is a bit nosey and is always poking around in their business and listening to their private conversations. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to sample the delights of their inane banter ­ I usually tire of it after an hour or so ­ but apparently this person can’t get enough of it, so my neighbours have resolved to tackle the problem once and for all.

I don’t know what they will do, but it is likely to be bloody and unattractive, as they are rather base and thuggish. What I do know for sure is that they will not go to the courts for a solution, unlike the heavyweight organisations that recently started to turn the screws on whistle-blowing web site Wikileaks.

Wikileaks is a site where insiders can post untraceable documents relating to activities that they feel need to be exposed to public scrutiny.

It was founded by dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and technologists from China, the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa, with the aim of subverting censorship and distributing the unvarnished truth. Since its launch, the site has flourished, and is now brimming with documents relating to all sorts of scandals.

Recently, however, the Swiss bank Julius Baer served a court order on the site after it published internal documents relating to its business. The move led to Wikileaks being delisted from a number of search engines, which effectively knocked it off the public internet. Wikileaks has since won an appeal and is back in business. As a damage-limtation exercise, Julius Baer’s legal action has backfired badly. With all the publicity the case has generated, the bank is saddled with the image of a company with something to hide.

But it is hardly unreasonable for a bank, or any business or organisation for that matter, to want its internal documents kept away from the glare of the public spotlight. You have to feel for the poor chief information officer at Julius Baer. Just imagine how they felt when they got to the office and discovered that an internal, and rather sensitive, document was now on the web for all the world to see, with no way of finding out who leaked it or any means of removing it.

So how can companies minimise the risk of suffering a similar fate as that which befell Julius Baer? For some it is a question of locking down all end-user systems and issuing draconian usage policies. Controlling information flow is a necessary but tricky task that brings with it issues of staff morale, security, data protection and device management, as well internet and email usage policies.

Listed on paper like that, these issues read like essential tasks for any modern firm. However, there are clearly many organisations that haven’t got a proper handle on them, as evidenced by the various documents posted on Wikileaks and going astray elsewhere. So it might be better for companies to focus on making the workplace a more positive environment so that staff wouldn’t want to put the firm in a bad light.

As for my neighbours, I can hear them knocking on my door, so it must be time for all of us to go and deal with the culprit. I do hope that it’s no one I know ­ that would be terribly embarrassing.