BONUS ASSIGMENT
BUSI 3040U: INFORMATION SYSTEMS
PRIVACY VIOLATIONS AND THEIR RAMIFICATIONS
ADEDAMOLA MAKINDE
S/N 100367804

EI fraud investigator axed for leaking “quota” details

This is the story of a private information leak by an employee of Service Canada. In February, Ms. Therrien went directly to the press and provided documents that were not authorized for public disclosure. Ms. Therrien leaked documents exposing a conservative crackdown on those receiving EI. The documents showed that EI investigators had been told to crackdown on about $485,000 in EI fraud each year. She further disclosed to the press that “fraud quotas” were just one of a culture in her office that encouraged benefits from as many recipients as possible to save money. As initial investigation was going on, she was suspended from her Job without pay from February 2013 until October 2013 when she was finally fired from the job. The letter sent on behalf of Employment and Social development Canada stated that she no longer met the conditions of her job. Certain control measures could have been taken to prevent this leak. The lady told the press that she felt bad that the government was not doing a good job by cutting down on EI payments. Her intention was good from what she told the press. In other words, these were private documents that involve government files and private files. There is no right for her to disclose any document that she is not authorized. Her Job does not permit her to use her access to such documents and give it to the press. In her other arguments She says she was penalized for not meeting her monthly quota of reducing EI claims. She claimed she was encouraged by managers to interpret facts in a way that would trim EI benefits. This could have been avoided by the Agency by monitoring employees activities in the firm if the agency has a monitoring system that monitors what kind of information employees were printing, such an incident could not have occurred. According to ethical standards, Ms. Therrien acted right but as the same time lost trust from her organization. The firm did the right thing by getting her fired so as to avoid future occurrence. The leak could also have been prevented if high profile information and documents are only accessible to the top officials of the agency. If this exact information had controlled access, there would be less risk of document leak. Also, at the network layer, controls must be capable of analyzing network traffic to detect and, when possible, prevent the transmission of sensitive data. Organization and Government agencies should lock down the network. The two most common avenues for insiders to move data out of the enterprise are email and the Web. In addition to analyzing Web and email traffic, network-based Data Loss products can monitor protocols and services, including instant messaging, social networking sites, peer-to-peer file sharing, and File Transfer Protocol.

Websites Leaking Users’ Information, Privacy Watchdog Warns Web leakage research conducted by the Privacy Commission Of Canada indicated that some leading Canadian websites are in appropriately passing information of their users to third – party sites such as advertising and marketing companies. The information that is being passed to these third parties sites includes names, email addresses and postal codes with out the consent and they are possibly violating the federal privacy law. The websites tested were shopping, travel and media websites. They disclosed in the research that when people sign up online to receive promotions from a particular shopping site their email address, username and city were disclosed to marketing firms and analytics companies that measure website usage. The researchers further found significant concerns with six sites, and had questions about practices of an additional five. The websites are run by large organizations but the Commission refuse to give name of the website violating these laws. The reason why this private information leaked is mostly for revenue or for research purposes, most online companies also like to monitor and understand their user base/customers more. They sell or give this information to firms who do online surveys and advertising companies who end up creating different ads in form of pop ups based on users information. Also this private information could be used for market analysis, trends and monitor different traffic of websites. This exact problem involves an ethical and legal issue in E-Business. E-business is knows to present some threats to privacy. Most electronic payments by these websites know who the buyers are. It is necessary for them to protect the buyer’s identities. One recommendation to protect buyer’s identities is to make use of encryption. An advantage is that by having the data encrypted it takes away the pain and worry that is associated with data breaches and the protection of intellectual property. To solve the problem of tracking, encryption is also a good method.

Manning Sentenced to 35 Years for a Pivotal Leak of U.S. Files Private First Class Bradley Manning was sentenced to 35 years in Prison Wednesday, August 21, 2013 for transmitting government documents to the antisecrecy website WikiLeaks, and he received a dishonorable discharge. Manning wrote in the petition that she started questioning the morality of U.S. actions in Iraq and Afghanistan while reading secret military reports daily in Iraq. The leak happens to be the largest-volume leak of classified material in U.S. history. The trove of documents leaked fell within four categories: videos, incident reports from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, information on detainees at Guantanamo and thousands of State Department cables. Bradley’s reason for leaking such information was not understood by the US government. Manning later wrote in the petition that he started questioning the morality of U.S. actions in Iraq and Afghanistan while reading secret military reports daily in Iraq. Once again, `ethical concerns were the reason while this documents and videos was leaked. In the video titled Collateral Murder released by WikiLeaks. The footage showed U.S.A soldiers firing gunshots at civilians, press and kids on the battleground, which is against the Law during war. Civilians, kids and Press are not to be killed during war. This one major event contributed to the reason for the leaks. The measure that could have been put in place in this situation is to not have recorded any video of the whole occurrence. Data security, quality, and integrity are critical, yet they are easily jeopardized. Also, the military data of such nature should be well secured and be stored in high security data centers that are only accessible by top military personnel. The military could have protected their documents by setting passwords to prevent unauthorized access via the network. They could also have erase or encrypt the data on the hard disk to prevent the information from leaking out.

Bibliography
Donovan, V. (2013, October 12). Ei fraud investigator axed for leaking “quota” details. . Retrieved from http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2013/10/24/ei_fraud_investigator_axed_for_leaking_quota_details.html

Canadian, P. (2012, September 25). Websites leaking users' information, privacy watchdog warns. . Retrieved from http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/websites-leaking-users-information-privacy-watchdog-warns-1.1260543

CHARLIE, S., & EMMARIE, H. (2013, August 21). Manning sentenced to 35 years for a pivotal leak of u.s. files. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/22/us/manning-sentenced-for-leaking-government-secrets.html?_r=0