Bloggers, Chat rooms, and E-mail: Y

Bloggers, Chat rooms, and E-mail: Your employer is watching.
“Troll tracker” was a popular blogger in the world of patent litigation. In fact, the blogger confessed to being a patent lawyer. The focus of the blog was “patent trolls”, the name patent lawyers give to business that purchase patents and then sue large companies to recover for infringement. Whilst Troll Tracker was blogging away, Cisco and other companies that were ending up as defendant in patent troll suits were lobbying Congress for changes in the law that could afford them some protection from what they felt were the willy-nilly attacks of the troll. However, Cisco was not aware that “Troll Tracker”. Whose site the company had commended to members of Congress, Was its own in-house patent counsel, Rick Frenkel
Frenkel had blogged that two plaintiffs’ patent lawyer had altered dates on documents, a charge that amounted to an accusation of felony misconduct by the lawyers (And the lawyers were named). In addition, Frenkel had allowed posts on his Troll Tracker blog such as” If you shoot and kill Ray Niro tonight, I would consider it a justifiable Killing” ( Niro was a plaintiff’s patent lawyer).
Eventually, through a subpoena to Google, the lawyer affected were able to track down Frenkel’s identify even though he had his blog hosted by a server in Korea and put down his address as one in Afghnistan.
The lawyer have sued both Frenkel and Cisco for Fefamation. Cisco has taken full responsibility for the problems, but notes that Troll Tracker played an important role in highlighting issues and that it does not want to cut off blogs all together.
The blogosphere represent a risk for companies, despite that fact that many are embracing it. Sun Microsystems indicates that it has 4000 employees with blogs (its CEO and general counsel are part of the group of blogging employees). Cisco has twelve in-house blogs and seventy-five employees who blog, including its CEO. However, since the Troll Tracker “outing”, Cisco has developed new policies that require the bloggers to state that they are employees of Cisco when they are discussing opinions related to maters that affect Cisco.
Experts worry that there is a tendency to the more reckless with facts and assertions when there is anonymity and that it is tough for those who are affected by the bloggers to track down sources and halt the spread of false information
QUESTIONS:
1. Introduce the cases;
2. Identify ethical issues of monitoring blog, email or chartrooms of employees
3. Use different theories of ethical philosophies to analyze the ethical issues;
4. Make a recommendation for the effectively ethical monitoring.