TECHNOLOGY used to track down Al-Qaeda terrorists is being offered to employers as a means of stamping out sexual harassment and other abusive behaviour in the workplace.

The new snooping software will allow companies to monitor all their employees’ e-mail, enabling them to ban even innocent social chitchat and to identify friendships and relationships among their workers.

The software has been developed by Autonomy, a Cambridge company that is a world leader in analysing and recognising patterns in otherwise unstructured information.

America’s Department of Homeland Security and 20 other government agencies are using Autonomy’s technology in the battle against terrorism.

Autonomy is now offering a version to investment banks and other large employers who fear being hit by multi-million-pound claims for sexual discrimination and harassment.

In July, Morgan Stanley, the Wall Street bank, had to pay $54m to settle claims that it had denied promotions and equal pay to its women bankers. In London, Stephanie Villalba, a senior banker with Merrill Lynch, recently claimed £7.5m for discrimination, victimisation and unequal pay.

Ian Black, managing director of Aungate, the Autonomy subsidiary that is promoting the sexual discrimination product, said the software could identify abusive and malicious intent in e-mails, picking up not just on key words but also on more subtle codes and patterns.

It can also spot problems even when an aggressive or bullying manager is not sending e-mails to his victim. In one bank, Aungate found that a head of department was urging his colleagues to upset or attack a female employee.

Black said the software was able to identify how much time employees spent discussing matters unrelated to their work, such as sport or their plans for the weekend. It could also copy any offending message to a compliance officer.

“This software can stop people swearing at another employee, stop people insulting them,” he said.

However, civil liberties groups warned this weekend that the new software posed a threat to the right to privacy. Barry Hugill of Liberty said: “By going down the route of constant monitoring you are creating a culture of surveillance.

“What might start out as something easy intellectually and morally to justify — such as monitoring someone who was sexually or racially harassing somebody by e-mail — very soon becomes checking people’s work patterns and work routines. It can become in itself a form of harassment.”

Aungate would not identify which banks were using the software, said to cost an average of £200,000.

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