Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter N
Hope I'm not jumping too far ahead but a couple of the the stand-out points for me are the clearly stated intentions to prevent the customer from knowing that they were being monitored and the fact that BT were tracking customer service reports and complaints.
That last one suggests that they have been lying to the authorities with regards to the people who have proof of their data being intercepted. BT have claimed that the customer service call centres were not aware of the trials and used that to explain the incorrect information given to callers and yet we now find that those same call centres were collating data regarding calls relating to the trials.
This ought to make a difference in the attitude of the police and other authorities who have so far taken BT's word for everything that's happened.
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My take on that is that they didn't tell the call centres anything about what they were doing, but clearly gave them some sort of protocol with regard to the type of customer calls they were dealing with - probably just hidden in a statistics report sheet listing various types of customer problem - and for those two weeks the report sheet would list things like
"I'm seeing strange scripts in my forum posts"
"I'm getting funny things happening in my status bar"
"I'm finding odd cookies on my machine"
I doubt the support staff had a clue what it was about, but they would be required to tick boxes so the faults could be statistically logged (but of course the customers would get no help solving the problems).
Remember the BT corporate culture - staff generally aren't told anything. They are always making major changes and telling no one - it's the way they do things.
I'm a regular on the support groups - it's amazing the things they don't tell us about or tell support about.
BT standard policy
1 - plan a change
2 - implement the change
3 - tell the press
4 - watch the customers get problems
5 - don't tell support
6 - watch the customers complain and give them misleading uninformed replies
7 - occasionally discover peer users have diagnosed and provided work-rounds for the problem. Fudge some sort of excuse. Post a url on an obscure part of the help system, which has the wrong advice on it.
8 - eventually (far too late) notice what peer users are saying and alter your advice to fit with theirs.
9 - do it all again a few weeks later.
(this is the story of the latest security "enhancements" to BTYahoo mail by the way but it could be anything, Webwise included)