I must admit to being very cynical about the Government’s announcement today that the National Broadband Network (NBN) will deliver speeds much higher than the originally promised 100 mbps.  Talk about pulling rabbits out of hats.  How convenient, a week and a bit before the election when the government is desperately trying to differentiate itself from the much less ambitious and cheaper network the opposition proposes.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy revealed today that he’d only been made aware of the new turbo-charged capacity by NBN co-chief executive Mike Quigley yesterday.  Yeah, sure, I believe him.  The timing enabled the government to further mock the opposition’s $6 billion broadband plan which will deliver speeds of 12 megabits per second using a patchwork of technologies.

I find myself having a lot of sympathy for Tony Abbott’s view on this announcement:

“This idea that ‘hey presto’ we are suddenly going to get 10 times the speed from something that isn’t even built yet I find utterly implausible.”

Wonder when they’ve suddenly discovered the higher speeds?  Done a test from one side of a lab to the other?  Maybe over-designed the network all along and saved this news up for a rainy day when the government needed it?  The whole thing has the smell of vapourware about it – lets promise the world now and figure out how to deliver it when we have to.

Something that really shits me is people’s employers getting all touchy about what the employees have to say on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.  In some cases employees have been sacked, or at least threatened with disciplinary action.

The NSW Department of Corrective Services is threatening to sack prison officers over posts they made to a Facebook group criticising the State Government’s plans to privatise prisons.  A prison officer, who did not wish to be named for fear of retribution, said about seven officers received letters from Deputy Commissioner Gerry Schipp advising them that they were under investigation for contravening department policies and the Public Sector Employment and Management Act.  The officers were accused of breaking Corrective Services policies relating to "public comment", of "bullying and/or harassing" employees and of making "offensive and/or disparaging" comments about senior employees.

Private chatter which was previously limited to settings like the pub is moving online and increasingly being used against employees, because there is a record of what they have been saying, unlike pub or water cooler gossip which stays only in people’s own memories – in the case of pub gossip, maybe impaired memories?

Public Service Association spokesman Stewart Little said he had never heard of anything like this happening anywhere in the public sector. He called it an unnecessary invasion into people’s private lives.

"It just seems extraordinary to me that a department would go to such lengths as to monitor a chat room on the internet,"

"We’re in a modern age now where people will communicate using things like Facebook and their mobile phones … are we going to monitor what’s said in clubs and bars and other social settings?"

There’s also recently been the case of Leslie Nassar, a Telstra employee, disciplined for his twittering activities recently, as Fake Stephen Conroy.

I reckon these employers need to harden the fuck up, not sook about criticism they might get from employees on social networks and just get on with minding their own business.  Unless the employees are divulging commercial secrets, the employer has no business with their out of work time social networking – if they are defaming individuals, then those individuals, not the company, are the right people to take action for the defamation.