Question: E-mail privacy.

Divide into two groups and prepare arguments for and against the following behavior: Your company has a clearly stated employee surveillance policy that stipulates that anything an employee does on a companyowned computer is subject to monitoring. You manage a regional office of 24 brokers for a company that offers lump-sum payments to people receiving installment payments-from lottery winnings or personal injury settlements-who would rather have a large amount of money now than small monthly checks for the next 5, 10, or 20 years.

You have just terminated one of your brokers for failing to meet his monthly targets for three consecutive months. He was extremely angry about the news, and when he went back to his cube, he was observed typing feverishly on his computer in the 10 minutes before building security arrived to escort him from the premises. When your IT specialist arrives to shut down the broker's computer, he notices that it is still open and logged in to his Gmail account and that there is evidence that several e-mails with large attachments had been sent from his company e-mail address to his Gmail address shortly after the time he was notified that he was being fi red. The e-mails had been deleted from the folder of sent items in his company account. The IT specialist suggests that you take a look at the e-mails and specifically the information attached to those e-mails. Should you?