I wonder if a judge would be willing to shut down this site simply because it's titled "Hacker News." It doesn't seem to be out of the realm of possibility considering the processes followed in this case.
Yeah, I hear this from time to time. My guess is that it is too much work to read every site every employee reads. When it comes time to fire them, though, then they go through your browsing history so they can fire you for reading "hacking web sites" instead of "not doing any work". Just speculating, but I'm having trouble imagining a department where the reading habits of 300,000 employees are analyzed in real time.
Thankfully, I got laid off from that job and now have a much better one where I'm encouraged to read all the hacker stuff I can. :)