Search Results: present your case

You are the network administrator for a rather large company. You have a young family and need your job to support them. Part of your responsibility as a network administrator is to monitor the emails for the organization. Usually this just means occasionally allowing through emails for staff members that have been accidentally blocked by the spam filters.

One day you get a helpdesk request from a staff member asking for an email to get released. Normally it’s standard procedure, except this time the request has come from the spouse of a very good friend of yours. You recognize the name on the helpdesk request so quickly attend to the problem. As part of the procedure you need to manually open up the email to ensure that it isn’t actually spam. You find that it turns out to be an email to your friend’s spouse from their lover. You scan the rest of the contents of the email and there is no doubt that they have been having an affair for some time now.

You release the email, but you can’t decide what to do now. Your initial reaction is to call your friend up and tell them about the email, however you quickly realize that company policy is very strict about revealing the contents of staff emails, and you will certainly lose your job if your boss finds out.

In any case you know that revealing this information presents great risk, because even if you don’t do it directly, there is a good chance that the dots will be joined somewhere along the line and you will be found out. However you feel that by not telling your friend you are helping their spouse to get away with adultery and this troubles you greatly.

What should you do?

(This was adapted from a moral question I was asked the other night.)