A few months ago, I was approached by my employer who told me that a scanner they have been running had found some comments I had made on this very site about the bank were not allowed under my NDA. They claimed that the comments I made could be construed as damaging to the company’s reputation and was against the terms of my employment. Whether or not their claims of damages were true, I realized the potential problems they could cause, and elected to remove the offending comments at the bank’s request. [Editor's Note: You will notice that I don't even mention the name of the bank I work for; I'm only ever allowed to refer to it as "the bank".]
[Editor's Note #2: Whether or not this is a matter of free speech is irrelevant. Normally I would be all about 'fighting the good fight', but I did sign away those rights when I took the job. I am aware of that; but this specific incident is not what this post is about.]
I had a meeting with the Director of Compliance when the issue was first brought up and he indicated that they would periodically monitor my site for the next little while, just to make sure that I wasn’t continuing to make any comments that would break my NDA. I said that was fine as I understood where they were coming from. I had broken the rules, and part of my punishment was simply the bank (or in this case, their hired help) watching me to make sure I didn’t break them again. Fair enough. I made my bed, now I have to sleep in it.
My problem is this: it’s now 3 months later and they are still monitoring my site. And not only are they still monitoring it but they’re using more bandwidth than all of my other visitors combined. For some reason, the word ‘overkill’ comes to mind.
First of all, I fail to see how I, the “incredibly dangerous Justin Smith”, can take down entire banking empires by merely mentioning their name on my blog. I know I signed away my rights to talk about it, but I’m not running some major anti-[bank-I-work-for] site; I’m writing in an online journal about my day-to-day experiences at my place of work.
Second of all, even if I did sign those rights away, at what point are you going to start trusting me again, and quit wasting away my server’s bandwidth. This site is graciously hosted by Divide0 Networks who have given me free reign to do whatever I want; no space or bandwidth restrictions, nothing. So how am I supposed to explain that their server is being probed many times a day just to see if I’ve so much as mentioned the company I work for, 3 months after the initial incident?
In the picture below, you’ll see Observer Group’s spider (host01.observer.net) in my logs (I have blurred out the other listed hosts to protect their privacy). If you look carefully, their spider has chewed through 124.34MB of bandwidth, while every other visitor combined only adds up to 91.03MB. 
Now I can go on and on about how this is absolutely unnecessary, and/or how they should stop immediately, ad nauseam. Unfortunately for myself, I know that will never get me anywhere. Big business holds all the cards and when they want to stack the deck, the little guy just gets to sit and watch the game unfold.
I submitted a request to my compliance director today to see if he can have this site removed from their watchlist. I’m sure you can understand that I wasn’t surprised when he told me that it’s unlikely they’ll just remove the site from their list.
If I get an update on the issue, I’ll be more than happy to keep you updated, but something tells me this is the last I’ll hear of it.
