I was once the IT administrator at a company for many years, and my policy regarding spying on internet/email communications was that unless something came to m

I was once the IT administrator at a company for many years, and my policy regarding spying on internet/email communications was that unless something came to my attention which warranted surveillance of an individual all user communications would be treated as private and confidential (the same as regular snail mail). I'd previously attended a security seminar where they made clear that, at least as far as the laws in the UK were concerned, if you intercepted an employee's communications or read their emails the reason for doing that must be one which would stand up to scrutiny in a court case. Without any specific legally defensible justification, "trawling" style spying on communications lays the IT administrator exposed to possible criminal charges. However, all that was more than five years ago, so things may have changed since.