Attach ments(4)

The Courier ad had said, “Full-time opportunity for Internet security officer. $40K+ Health, dental.”

Internet security officer. Lincoln had pictured himself building firewalls and protecting the newspaper from dangerous hackers—not sending out memos every time somebody in Accounting forwarded an off-color joke to the person in the next cubicle.

The Courier was probably the last newspaper in America to give its reporters Internet access. At least that’s what Greg said. Greg was Lincoln’s boss, the head of the IT office. Greg could still remember when the reporters used electric typewriters. “And I can remember,” he said, “because it wasn’t that long ago—1992. We switched to computers because we couldn’t order the ribbon anymore, I shit you not.”

This whole online thing was happening against management’s will, Greg said. As far as the publisher was concerned, giving employees Internet access was like giving them the option to work if they felt like it, look at porn if they didn’t.

But not having the Internet was getting ridiculous.

When the newspaper launched its Web site last year, the reporters couldn’t even go online to read their stories. And most readers wanted to e-mail in their letters to the editor these days, even third- graders and World War II veterans.

By the time Lincoln started working at The Courier, the Internet experiment was in its third month.

All employees had internal e-mail now. Key employees, and pretty much everyone in the news division, had some access to the World Wide Web.

If you asked Greg, it was all going pretty well.

If you asked anyone in upper management, it was chaos.

People were shopping and gossiping; they were joining online forums and fantasy football leagues.

There was some gambling going on. And some dirty stuff. “But that isn’t such a bad thing,” Greg argued. “It helps us weed out the sickos.”

The worst thing about the Internet, as far as Greg’s bosses were concerned, was that it was now impossible to distinguish a roomful of people working diligently from a roomful of people taking the What-Kind-of-Dog-Am-I? online personality quiz.

And thus …Lincoln.

On his very first night, Lincoln helped Greg load a new program called WebFence on to the network. WebFence would monitor everything everyone was doing on the Internet and the Intranet.

Every e-mail. Every Web site. Every word.

And Lincoln would monitor WebFence.

An especially filthy-minded person (maybe Greg) had defined the program’s mail filters. There was a whole list of red flags: nasty words, racial slurs, supervisors’ names, words like “secret” and “classified.”

That last one, “classified,” beached the entire network during WebFence’s first hour by flagging and storing each and every e-mail sent to or from the Classified Advertising department.

The software also flagged large attachments, suspiciously long messages, suspiciously frequent messages…. Every day, hundreds of possibly illicit e-mails were sent to a secure mailbox, and it was Lincoln’s job to follow up on every one. That meant reading them, so he read them. But he didn’t enjoy it.

He couldn’t admit this to his mother, but it did feel wrong, what he was doing, like eavesdropping.

Maybe if he were the sort of person who liked that sort of thing …His girlfriend Sam—his ex- girlfriend—always used to peek in other people’s medicine cabinets. “Robitussin,” she’d report in the car on the way home. “And generic Band-Aids. And something that looked like a garlic press.”

Lincoln didn’t even like using other people’s bathrooms.

There was a whole complicated process he was supposed to follow if he caught someone actually breaking The Courier’s rules. But most offenses called for just a written warning, and most offenders got the message after that.

In fact, the first round of warnings worked so well, Lincoln started to run out of things to do.

WebFence kept flagging e-mails, a few dozen a day, but they were almost all false alarms. Greg didn’t seem to care. “Don’t worry,” he said to Lincoln on the first day that WebFence didn’t snag a single legitimate violator. “You won’t get fired. The men upstairs love what you’re doing.”

“I’m not doing anything,” Lincoln said.

“Sure, you are. You’re the guy who reads their e-mail. They’re all scared of you.”

“Who’s scared? Who’s they?”

“Everybody. Are you kidding? This whole building is talking about you.”

“They’re not scared of me. They’re scared of getting caught.”

“Getting caught by you. Just knowing that you’re snooping around their Sent folders every night is enough to keep them following the rules.”