"Why was that?" I asked.

"Because the former CSO had several people fired because she suspected falsely that they had visited porn sites. Some of us went to bat for them and told her they didn't do it, but she insisted that their activities were chronic and that she had logs off the Web filtering system that proved they were chronic offenders," the employee answered.

Several others chimed in: "We can't trust the security department to hear our side of the story, so it's better to keep quiet."

Checking back with the security teams, I found out that the rumors were true about my predecessor and that people were fired for what she thought was porn-surfing during office hours on company equipment.

The technology staff tried to explain to her that what she thought was surfing was really those pop-up browser ads for porn sites. Some legit websites allow sponsored pop-ups for the porn-ad industry, and those erroneously make it look like the employee is frequenting porn sites.