Netiquette

ichard Eisinger of the Social Security Administration was riding a shuttle bus from the agency's headquarters near Baltimore to his Washington office at the end of a workday when the shuttle driver mentioned she was buying a car for the first time and and was afraid she'd get taken.

He invited her to his office, logged onto the Internet, found the wholesale price of the car, printed it out and advised her to negotiate from that price, not the sticker price.

"I happened to mention this to somebody a few days later and they said, 'Dick, you can't do that,' " Eisinger says. "I said, 'I can't use the Internet after work?' They said, 'No, you can't use your computer for personal use.' I said, 'Is there a cost to the government?' I went to our systems people and I was told there is no additional cost. The only cost is if you print out a piece of paper. I thought, 'Maybe I shouldn't have done that,' and I stopped doing it. But it didn't make sense. It still doesn't make sense."

Unlike many federal employees who bump up against agency Internet use policies, though, Eisinger, as a senior SSA executive, was in a position to do something about it. When he started looking into Internet policies, he discovered similar dissatisfaction at other agencies as well.

Ultimately, SSA became one of the lead agencies in a push late last year and early this year to create the first government-wide policy on employee use of the Internet, several years after it became commonly available in the executive branch. The move to set a central standard did not arise because there has been widespread abuse of the technology. Officials say that flagrant abuse has proven to be a relatively minor problem-especially when weighed against the advantages the government has reaped. But developments of the last several years have raised other issues that weren't foreseen at the outset.

The interagency effort led to a draft policy on Internet use that was sent to the Chief Information Officers Council earlier this year. The group's work revealed that while the executive branch has largely delivered on its commitment to get its employees on the Internet, it has a grab bag of policies on how that access should be used. Until several months ago, no one organization even knew what all the policies said.

Widening Access

Like information out on the Internet itself, data on its use inside the government is not always reliable nor up to date. The most recent comprehensive study, published by the General Accounting Office in June 1997 (eons ago in the Internet world), found that 42 large federal agencies provided e-mail access to about half their employees and World Wide Web access to about a third. Those numbers included both civilian and military personnel.

GAO also found that Internet-related expenses at those agencies, including both capital and operating costs, rose from $51 million in fiscal 1994 to $182 million in fiscal 1996. But those were only estimates, because agencies typically do not account for Internet expenses separately from other information technology spending.

The government's commitment to the Internet has no doubt increased significantly since then both in terms of employee access and expenditures, although there are no firm accountings of either. Federal officials overseeing Internet issues say the majority of white-collar employees who are not involved in repetitive work such as forms processing now have World Wide Web access, with more coming online all the time.

Some agencies, such as the General Services Administration, have given access to all their employees, while others give it to everyone at certain facilities-for example, an entire Defense Department base. Others limit access because of the nature of the work, security considerations or lack of funds. In many cases where employees don't have full Internet access, though, they at least have e-mail.

There is a widespread assumption that the Internet has improved federal productivity. Commonly reported benefits include faster and more effective communication between colleagues and with the public; easy access to professional, scientific or technical information needed for work projects; faster and more cost-effective dissemination of information; and reduced paperwork. Stories abound of reports that used to take weeks of research in libraries being completed with a few days of research on the Internet and of faster purchasing through electronic ordering. Many employees and managers say they don't know how they lived without the Internet.

"I know there's a lot of hand-wringing, particularly at levels above us, that people would misuse this thing. But overall it's a good tool to access information quickly that you couldn't get otherwise," says Mike Klinker, traffic management supervisor at the Federal Aviation Administration's Washington In-Route Air Traffic Control Center in Leesburg, Va., where Internet access was installed at the watch desk several months ago. "There's weather information, aviation information, accident reports and information about FAA policies and directives that we can readily access, whereas before we had to hunt down where the books would be."

However, no formal study to quantify productivity improvement around the government has been conducted. Firm measures of such gains are notoriously elusive in the information technology field.

"It's very hard to isolate Internet access. There isn't a simple way [to conclude] that because you have Internet access 'X' has happened," says G. Edward DeSeve, who recently departed as deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget. "To us, it's just another tool. It's like having a fax machine or a long-distance telephone. It's the overall set of business processes that are enabled by the tool."

"It's given us instantaneous access to information that we previously had to wait for," DeSeve adds. "We're now operating in real time in a lot of circumstances. If you need to get a document cleared or you need to get minutes of a meeting out, it just happens a lot faster than it used to."

Drawing the Line

The experience has not been totally positive, though. Officials say there have been abuses, ranging from wasted working hours to criminal misconduct, plus new management challenges.

Searches of decisions from the Merit Systems Protection Board and Federal Labor Relations Authority of recent years did not reveal any cases involving Internet misuse. But that means only that no appeals reached the top review levels of those agencies. It could be that disciplinary actions were taken but were not contested, or were upheld at lower levels of MSPB and FLRA and not appealed.

As with benefits from Internet use, information on misuse and its consequences remains largely anecdotal. In its 1997 report, GAO recounted several incidents, including:

• An Interior Department employee provided private citizens with free access to Internet services through the department's networks, resulting in a letter of counseling.
• Two National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration employees were suspended for two weeks for downloading sexually explicit material, and one employee was fired for sending threatening e-mail.
• Nearly 100 employees of an Energy Department laboratory were disciplined-penalties ranged from reprimands to dismissal, with criminal charges in one case-for inappropriately using computers to access adult-oriented sites.

Many agencies allow some personal use of the World Wide Web. The Environmental Protection Agency, for example, allows "limited, occasional access to the Internet on government computers, provided that there is no fee charged to the government and provided that there is no access to or transmission of sexually explicit or obscene materials or information, or access to or transmission of gambling materials and information."

Other offices have stricter policies. The Office of the Senate Sergeant at Arms, for example, views accessing pornographic information as a violation of sexual harassment policy and as such "grounds for immediate termination of employment."

Agencies also commonly block the types of Web sites their employees can visit, with a few offices even barring access to any commercial Web pages.

Most collect statistics on what sites their employees access, or at least have tools that can track Web page visits. Sometimes they also take special action. Several agencies notified employees last year not to download independent counsel Kenneth Starr's lengthy report on the Monica Lewinsky scandal when it first was posted, because it was jamming their networks.

Preventing and punishing Web misuse has proved difficult, though, even where agencies have strict policies. The nature of the Internet means that users visit sites they know nothing about and go down blind alleys. Some turn out to be mere dead ends, while others lead to places the user should not be, at least not while on a government computer. Sites that carry pornography, for example, sometimes use misleading identifiers to draw traffic.

Officials who follow Internet-use policies say that as a practical matter, an individual's pattern of use draws attention only when someone repeatedly goes to a site with no official purpose. They add that there's not much enthusiasm in agencies for imposing maximum penalties if misuse
doesn't involve much time, doesn't disrupt work and carries negligible cost.

"I think one of the issues we have to be sensitive to is that when you're doing research on the Internet, sometimes it might appear somebody was doing something personal because the hyperlinks are not always what they appear to be. You can end up at an unusual site," says Richard Kellett, director of the emerging IT policies division at the General Services Administration. "I don't think we want to create an environment where somebody accidentally goes in an area that might appear personal, they have this fear that the chain of command is going to come down on them."

Excessive misuse, however, can bring into play standards of ethical conduct regarding use of government property and of official time. The problem in drawing the line is that the Web virtually guarantees that some time that employees spend on it will be wasted, if the definition of waste is time not on sites hosting information directly needed for the employee's job.

"It's very difficult to find the information you're looking for unless you already know where to go," says Melinda NesSmith-Picard, an environmental engineer at the Navy submarine base at Kings Bay, Ga., who uses the Web extensively. "You think you're getting close and you can't quite get there. You have to be very diligent and focused on what you're doing, and you have to be able to say, 'Hey, I've been surfing for an hour and I'm not getting anywhere. I need to try something different.' It's a double-edged sword. It's a great resource if you're skilled at using it. But it's really easy to waste time."

Within limits, even unfocused surfing can be a good thing, some managers say. They encourage browsing, at least at the outset, so that employees can learn how to use the Web and find out what information is available to help them in their jobs. Once employees are over the mystique of the Internet, these managers say, they see it as a tool and not a toy.

Still, the Web offers temptations. While outright abuse such as visiting pornographic sites is considered fairly rare, visits to favorite unofficial sites are more common.

"Even people who are scrupulous find fringe areas," says Mike Oliver, an engineering manager at the Energy Department's Carlsbad, N.M., area office. "They don't dabble in blatant abuse, but there are little things they check on. For instance, hardly any office that I'm aware of would tell people they couldn't check the weather. Yet that's not official business. And there are other things in the realm of being a good neighbor in your community, checking on community events--that's a little shaky with or without the blessings of the hierarchy. The scrupulous would do those sorts of things. The unscrupulous would head for Playboy."

Even innocent surfing can be a problem when too much time becomes involved, as can easily happen. "It's like your child--'I'll just be on it for a minute.' Well, the minute turns out to be an hour, and the hour goes to two," says a manager at a Defense Department depot.

Managers and other officials say employees with strong ethical principles won't abuse the Internet; for more unscrupulous workers, it just offers another way to waste time. If they weren't on the Internet, they'd be in the cafeteria or talking to their friends on the telephone. Viewed in that light, Internet abuse by employees is more a symptom than a problem in itself. Gregory Chow, a manager in the competition and closure office at McClellan Air Force Base, Calif., says that the Internet can highlight not only behavioral problems but also internal problems in an agency. "You may go along without thinking you have a problem where the Internet isn't a factor," he says. "But now that it is available, you see the symptoms. The causes are deeper rooted."

Flood of E-Mail

Aside from its potential for misuse, the Internet has brought new challenges and opportunities that have become intertwined with the government's drives to reduce staff and push decision-making to lower levels.

"What we think as we go forward is that a lot of the downsizing in government has been permitted by Internet communications," says OMB's DeSeve. "The fact that I can deal with a lot of people directly means there's less need for intermediate staff. I find myself looking at things I never would have looked at and people are sending me things that I never would have gotten without the Internet. So many more people have visibility of what's going on and are able to make contributions."

Managers say the difficulty in such an environment, both in general and with the Internet in particular, is to maintain a balance between employee empowerment and necessary controls.

"In an effort to provide 'quality' in the workplace, the workplace has been turned into a freelance opportunity," says a supervisor at a Navy facility. "It has given employees a wide range of information that has nothing to do with the position description of the job. Supervisors are overworked due to downsizing and now have to monitor daily use of government equipment.

"I have made it very clear that only work-related items may be searched on the Internet," she adds. "Unfortunately, with separate workstations a supervisor is not aware every minute of the day of what the employee is doing on the computer."

Agencies also are wrestling with the implications of the increasing amounts of e-mail coming in from the public-so many for some employees that they say they sometimes have to choose between answering their e-mail and getting their work done.

In order to answer the large volume of e-mail, questions from the public are being pushed farther down the organization. Thus, the Internet is helping to make experts more accessible-while adding to their workloads.

At the same time, how e-mail is answered affects the agency's image and its relationship with the public. Also, agencies must make sure that when employees respond, they provide information that is consistent with what would be written in a letter. That might mean supervisory review, which can be difficult when each subordinate employee may be sending out dozens of replies a day.

Some agencies have integrated e-mail and Web content rules with their general policies on correspondence and release of information. One growing trend is the use of e-mail control systems that route questions on certain topics to designated employees. Also, agencies are posting more "frequently asked questions" pages on their Web sites and are linking to sites of other agencies that might have the needed information. Some agency Web sites make no provision for receiving e-mail, while others may promise to review messages but don't promise to respond to them.

Internal e-mail volume is growing as well, improving communications within agencies. But there, too, the growth has produced some drawbacks, officials say. E-mail makes it easy to send messages to a large audience, contrasting with paper memos, where policy limits distribution to those who have a need to know. The result is that many people are forced to waste time going through e-mail that isn't pertinent to their jobs.

And while drawers full of forms have been eliminated, so too has some of the control over decision-making that the paper-oriented workplace entailed. Not all of those controls were just red tape; they created records assuring that plans passed through the proper hands before decisions were made. With electronic communication, such trails can vanish into the ether or, at least, require reconstruction from the computer's files.

Some employees have simply abused e-mail, officials say. At holiday times, agencies commonly send out reminders against circulating electronic greeting cards. At other times, system postmasters have had to step in to cut off chain e-mails. Employees have used the systems to circulate jokes and in some cases to act as mail list servers for outside organizations such as churches, says Keith Thurston of GSA, who works with the federal postmasters group under the CIO Council.

Similarly, employees sometimes send individual messages large enough to clog agency systems. But even in such cases, it can be hard to say definitively that the use was improper. Thurston recalls an employee who brought a system to a halt by sending a 200-megabyte e-mail--3 megabytes is about the standard maximum for Internet service providers. But it turned out that he was sending PowerPoint slides home to work on them over the weekend.

Flexible Policy

Officials working on the proposed model Internet policy have tried to take such conflicting factors into account. And the policy would leave room for agencies to tailor rules according to their own needs. The guidance has been drafted in terms of general policy on the use of government office equipment, since officials quickly found that Internet policies can't easily be separated from those governing use of computers in general and other types of equipment.

In fact, one of the main points of the draft policy-allowing minimal personal use of the Internet during off-duty hours, including during lunch, if there's no added cost to the government-is based on the government's reasoning when it loosened rules on personal use of agency telephones several years ago. It's more efficient, in that view, to allow employees to make occasional personal calls from their desks than to require them to leave the office and go to a public phone. Similarly, employees should be allowed to perform minor personal chores on the Internet.

At the same time, the policy will make it clear that Internet access is a privilege, not a right, and that employees should have no expectations of privacy while using government computers, even on their own time. Officials say that the idea of officially sanctioned personal use of the Internet, even off the clock and at no cost to the taxpayer, will require some selling both inside and outside the government. But in the government information technology community at least, the overriding issues on Internet use are quality of work life for employees and consistency among agencies.

GSA's Michele Heffner, program manager for the CIO Council, notes that for CIOs, the major Internet-use issue is security. "They're less concerned with people abusing [the Internet] because I think the productivity outweighs any problems that you have," she says. "It's just becoming such a critical part of an agency's mission in getting information out to the public and sharing between agencies. They want to promote that as much as possible and they're looking at having a common policy as a means of trying to create an open environment and a fair standard across the government."

Says Eisinger, "Because you have a couple of people who have taken advantage of the privilege, who have violated the policies, do you ruin it for everybody else? I say no. We expect almost all of our employees except a handful to do the right thing. There will always be those that don't. Hopefully we'll find them and we'll take the privilege away.

"I think employees are going to be grateful. They're going to feel better about their jobs and their workplace. I'm not going to say it's going to increase productivity, but it's not going to decrease productivity."

Eric Yoder is a Washington-area freelance journalist who has covered the federal government for 17 years.