Government Executive - Authors - Rebecca Greenfield

The Government Is Snooping Through Your Snail Mail

Rebecca Greenfield, The Wire — Fri, 05 Jul 2013 09:19:34 -0400

In addition to the email and phone metadata the U.S. government is tracking, the feds also have an eye on your regular old snail mail, which is actually a "treasure trove of information," according to a former FBI agent who used to work with the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, as it's called. One would think that snail mail, a relic from a former century, wouldn't provide that much insight into our lives -- isn't it all bills and unwamted brochures by now? But, it's just about as useful, it not more so, than digital collection. "Looking at just the outside of letters and other mail, I can see who you bank with, who you communicate with — all kinds of useful information that gives investigators leads that they can then follow up on with a subpoena," James J. Wedick, the FBI agent, told The New York Times's Ron Nixon.

That's pretty much what the NSA can find through digital tracking, as explained here, but the mail surveillance program is even worse from a privacy advocates standpoint because there is zero oversight. "You just fill out a form," Wedick explains. The U.S. Postal Service grants or denies the request withoutany judicial overview — there's not even a secret court involved. And it's all okay, say courts, because people shouldn't expect privacy for the outside of their mail. Which: sure, anyone can look at the outside of a given envelope. But, is that the same thing as someone rifling through our mail every single day? Apparently.

The government has used that argument to justify digital surveillance, notes Nixon. "Officials in both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, in fact, have used the mail-cover court rulings to justify the N.S.A.’s surveillance programs, saying the electronic monitoring amounts to the same thing as a mail cover," he writes. Congress hasn't even talked about the physical mail tracking program since 1976, even with "sporadic" reports of abuse, like opening letters to and from the Soviet Union. The whole thing sounds like a disturbing look at how the current digital surveillance program will look in 40 years: After debate, the program continues, people forget about it and then it's a weird precedent for more tracking.

The Myth of the Cool Office

Rebecca Greenfield, The Wire — Tue, 25 Jun 2013 16:31:00 -0400

Don't be fooled by the perks at all those Silicon Valley (and Alley) offices — it's all just part of a subtle plot to control employee behavior. The founders of Fab.com, which just got itself a $1 billion valuation, admitted as much to Bloomberg's Sarah Freier. The shopping site wields its beer on tap, free lunch, and ice-cream machine as a means to force Fab employees to send emails in a "certain font," use high-quality paper, and always "be Fab" — whatever terrible thing that means. Those types of office perks abound at startups, of course, not only as a way to attract the best talent, but also to get that "talent" working on message, official office font included. Each and every kegerator serves as a reminder of what you owe the company. And that's just the food and drink. Let's take a look, by way of a couple recent trend stories and startup proclamations, at how the so-called "escalation of perks" keeps employees in line all over the tech world and "progressive" companies the world over.

Unlimited Vacation Days Nobody Takes

It sounds like the best perk ever: You could, officially, and under official policy, get paid for a three-month summer vacation. But of course the increasingly popular you-work-so-hard-that-we-won't-count strategy doesn't work that way. First, most companies wouldn't allow it. The marketing company Xiik, for example, boasts the limitless vacation offer, but in its fine print discourages long hiatuses. "There are no hidden agendas; xiik employees can take as much paid time off as needed," claims a Xiik project manager on the company website, before clarifying what that really means: "As nice as it would be to regularly leave for months at a time, common sense prevails: In most cases, it simply doesn't make sense to be away from work for extended periods."

Translation: non-stop vacation is a ruse.

Sure, three months of leave is a bit much. But how much is okay to take when your HR manager says you can take as much as you like? An employee completely loses leverage when he or she doesn't have a set amount of days to claim. If a boss says no to a lengthy request under the unlimited policy, then there's not really much a worker can do; an employee with a set amount of time off can always go with the but-still-have-a-week-left-this-year line.

Read about other "cool" office "perks" at The Atlantic Wire.

Image via Franck Boston/Shutterstock.com

]]>

Do You Need to Meet Everyone You Hire?

Rebecca Greenfield, The Wire — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 14:48:00 -0400

After a pile of backlash over her work-from-home ban, Marissa Mayer, the Yahoo CEO who can do no right, is now getting flack for trying to get the best people to work at her fledgling company, which might not be as ridiculous as it sounds. Just ask Sheryl Sandberg.

At a company meeting a few weeks ago Mayer addressed and handily dismissed complaints that her hiring practices are "too rigorous," reports Reuters, speaking with anonymous sources. These "tightened" recruiting measures include a personal meeting with Mayer for every candidate, something Sandberg used to do at Google, which might be where Mayer picked up her knack for HR involvement. But Sandberg, the Facebook COO who's been compared to Mayer endlessly in the last month, only got involved until she realized that her "insistence on speaking personally to every candidate had become a huge bottleneck," she writes in her book Lean In. The same thing has started happening at Yahoo, according to a former executive who spoke with Reuters: "One person we wanted waited eight weeks, then they inevitably got another offer." So, maybe there is something to the latest round of Mayer critiques.

Then again, as recently as 2011, years after Sandberg abandoned her policy of getting involved in every hire under her watch, Googlers have said "we suck at hiring" — mostly because there aren't enough humans involved in the process. (Also because Google has lost a lot of people to Facebook.) Like everything else, Google uses algorithms for recruitment, as The New York Timesexplained back in 2011. On top of that, Yahoo doesn't have the luxury of turning down a lot of highly qualified people right now. It doesn't have the same prestige as Google or Facebook. Mayer's trying to change that, in part by attracting the best workers. But her drive to hire the best of Silicon Valley may, in fact, be turning these best people away. So, she's kind of got herself stuff in a vicious cycle.

Or maybe we've got the focus all wrong. Really, as with all things Mayer, shouldn't we be asking how this affects working parents? There must be a way. Marissa Mayer, who already Has It All, selfishly wants more. Yes, that must be it. Or, the baby. This must have to do with the most important baby in all of Silicon Valley. It's unclear how, but certainly someone somewhere will creatively connect the hiring debacle to this move.

]]>

What Your Email Inbox Count Says About You

Rebecca Greenfield and Jen Doll, The Wire — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 07:00:00 -0500

What's the number of unread emails—right now, at this moment, without changing anything—in your inbox? That would be 3,487 in the case of Jen here; 1 in the case of Rebecca. More about what that means in a second, but first, a bit of backstory: The New Yorker's Silvia Killingsworth has embarked on an exploration of what she dubs in her headline as "Zero Dark Inbox," or having absolutely zero unread emails in one's inbox. She writes, "I have four e-mails in my inbox right now, but I’m aiming for that number to be zero. Like many practitioners of the 'Inbox Zero' system, I treat my inbox like a to-do list, with each e-mail representing a task...." She's adhering to a method promoted by Merlin Mann, a lifehacker and proponent of Getting Things Done; essentially, it's the digital version of opening all your letters (what letters?) and bills when you receive them and dealing with them then as opposed to setting them aside and waiting for the bill collectors to start bugging you to pay up (not that we would do that, of course).

Killingsworth took on the pursuit of Inbox Zero for herself, calling it "exhilarating and terrifying"—fortunately, like many a process-and-detail-oriented person, "I am addicted to the gratification that comes from tidying up," she writes. Inbox Zero is a coping mechanism, a way to move on with conversations throughout the day; on the down side, entire threads may be forgotten, no longer staring you in the face. "And what about when you actually reach Inbox Zero? It doesn’t feel like winning. It feels like staring into the abyss," she explains. But there are at least many like-minded or attempting-to-be-like-minded commiserators with whom you can share your attempts to get there, so that's fun, sort of like a support group.

But if Killingsworth and her ilk, wholeheartedly and diligently attempting to get to Zero, are one example of an email-lifestyle, what are the others? We undertook a brief investigation of the staff of The Atlantic Wire to find out What Our Inbox Numbers Say About Us (and therefore, perhaps, you too; remember ourbook readers diagnostic?). As for our unread email counts, here's what we found.