[humorix] Corporate Surveillance HOWTO

[James Baughn <jbaughn@ldd.net>]

Corporate Surveillance HOWTO
July 11, 2000

Back in the old days, many businessmen believed the saying,
"The customer is always right."  The rules have changed
since then. Nowadays, the customer is a potential enemy,
capable of spreading truthful information about your
company at the speed of light.  

The truth is the last thing any large corporation wants the
public to know.  You only want your supplicants to be
exposed to the pravda that's been sifted and churned
through your public relations department and then properly
spun, slanted, and buzzword-enhanced.  Anything less could
be spell disaster for your bottom line.

In this HOWTO, we provide some guidelines for how you, the
corporate executive, can put a stop to disgruntled
truth-spreading customers.

Now you could use some service like eWatch to track down
your enemies and "re-educate" them.  But they want an
outrageous amount to cleanse the truth spread by each
"screenname".  But why pay all that money for somebody else
to use a search engine and  then fire off a couple bark
letters?  Save your precious Venture Capital for some more
worthwhile project, such as installing a fifth pool table
in the game room next to the bowling alley. (But don't ever
consider improving your product or customer service; that's
just like throwing money away.)

You might consider striking a deal with a government agency
that employs wiretapping, email sniffing, or other
Echelon-like surveillance activities. This shouldn't be too
difficult; every government body from the FBI down to the
Boondock County Trash-Pickup Authority practice espionage
on their own citizens.  Just make a few well-placed bribes,
and you'll be able to tap into their taxpayer-funded spy
network to track your enemies.

On the other hand, cozying up to the Feds might be overkill
for your purposes.  Armed with a search engine, you might
be able to do the dirty work yourself.  Indeed, you might
hit paydirt just by browsing the typical hangouts for
anti-corporate truth-mongers, such as Slashdot, Yahoo
message boards, Usenet, or humor sites.  Once you've
tracked down the little twerp, then it's time for action.  

Have your legal department send them some threatening
letter (email or snail mail) about how they are violating
your intellectual property rights and, if they persist,
they could face immediate jailtime.  Your crafty lawyers
will be able to conjure up something; it doesn't have to be
true, just as long as your enemy falls for it.

You might not be able to locate their email address,
though.  Especially if it's one Mr. Anonymous Coward, the
nefarious yet untrackable Slashdot denizen who has a beef
against every company in existence.  Many corporate spies
have spent countless man-hours tracking down this
mega-disgruntled customer, but to no avail.  Your only
recourse might be to employ an Astroturf campaign to
neutralize AnonCow by posting lots of positive hype-filled
comments about your company.

If you are unable to uncover the identity of your enemies,
you can always buy a court judge into issuing a subpeona
forcing the website owners to fork over their server logs. 
It worked against Yahoo, after all.  The logs will tell
you, among other things, the twerp's IP number.  You can
then cross-reference this datum against the FBI's
sorta-secret Echelon database to reveal the Social Security
number, postal address, shoe size, DNA sequence,
fingerprint, and PGP private key of your enemy.

With that information in hand, you can then step up the
pressure:

1. Contact their employers.  Tell the boss that your
   targets are emotionally unbalanced and need to be fired
   immediately before they cause any irreperable PR
   damage.  After all, if they are capable of spreading
   unauthorized information about your company, then surely
   they could snap at any time and distribute truths about
   their own employer.

2. If they maintain their own website that has information
   critical of your company, then send a nice little
   threatening letter to their ISP.  As before, have your
   lawyers fill it with obtuse legalese and vague
   references to the "DMCA" while making veiled threats of
   lawsuits or imprisonment unless the unauthorized
   material is immediately deleted.

3. Don't forget about hired goons.  Ever since the early
   1900's, usage of hired thugs has dropped off, which
   means that many businesses are missing out on this
   wonderful tool.  Goons, when hired through an anonymous
   third party, are a wonderful way to scare the living
   daylights out of your truth-spreaders since the stooges
   can't be traced back to you. Of course, which type of
   hired thugs you choose (muscle-building gun-slinging
   athletes or briefcase-pushing fast-talking lawyers) is
   entirely up to you.

4. Offer to hire them at your company.  This might sound
   absurd, but it could work as a last result.  Everybody
   has a price -- even the most ardent Linux zealot would
   gleefully become a Microsoft employee if enough money
   were waved in his face.  And once these people are
   assimilated (and re-educated) into your corporate
   culture, they shouldn't present any more trouble.  For
   instance, if some low-budget humor site keeps poking fun
   at your company by way of sarcastic HOWTO guides, you
   could always co-opt the webmaster with a load of money
   and stock options, and he'll never give you any trouble
   again.

The promotional materials for the eWatch monitoring and
re-education service state that, "It is unfortunate that
companies are being targeted by entities whose motives are
fraudulent, deceptive, or criminal."  (In other words,
people who publish unauthorized criticisms of your company
on the Internet, a medium which was intended by its
founders as the exclusive domain of large corporations).

But armed with the suggestions in this HOWTO, you and your
company's legal department should be able to effectively
stamp out this menace once and for all, thus ensuring that
everything said about your company in public has been
pre-approved by your marketing department.

---

P.S. I'm going to be gone on vacation for two weeks starting
tommorrow (July 12th)... which means there won't be any new
articles for awhile.  Ta ta.

-
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