More Federal Employees Caught Using Work Computers To Access Porn, Claim 'Boredom' Made Them Do It
from the and,-as-usual,-it's-still-the-taxpayers-being-acrobatically-fucked dept
It's sometimes hard to believe, but government employees are people. And like most people who have access to an internet connection, they occasionally go surfing for porn. Perfectly normal. Except… well, except for many things.Only the truly unemployed would be likely to go searching for porn as often as one SEC employee did, when he ran into the agency's anti-porn firewall 1,800 times during a two-week period, without ever once considering this was how the system was designed, rather than just an indication that he wasn't trying hard enough. Multiple employees at the agency were reprimanded for watching porn on their work computers for "98% of the workday."
A state official in Oregon infected the government's computer system with a nasty trojan hitchhiker picked up while surfing for porn. This resulted in a data leak, but the employee was reprimanded solely for using a work computer inappropriately.
An investigation by the EPA's Office of the Inspector General (OIG) found one employee had downloaded and viewed more than 7,000 pornographic images while on the clock. When OIG investigators went to ask the employee about the images, they found the employee "actively viewing pornography."
Recent investigations are finding more of the same. Government employees apparently can't seem to separate work and [self] pleasure, using both tax dollars and work computers to facilitate their porn habits. But it's not so much the habit that's truly infuriating It's the excuse.
For one Federal Communications Commission worker, his porn habit at work was easy to explain: Things were slow, he told investigators, so he perused it “out of boredom” — for up to eight hours each week.Now, I don't know about you, but I've had boring jobs before, where not every minute of the day was spent working. And I've had access to the internet at the same time. And not once did I think the lack of work meant I should use work computers to access porn. Not once. But for these government employees, it's apparently a legitimate excuse. Boredom is all the justification needed to break the universal rule that work computers should not be used to access NSFW sites. And they didn't just do it a couple of times. They did it constantly. It's completely disingenuous to blame your job for your porn habit, especially when your employment is funded by money taken from people directly out of their paychecks without their explicit consent.
[...]
“He stated he is aware it is against government rules and regulations, but he often does not have enough work to do and has free time,” investigators wrote of another federal employee, this one at the Treasury Department, who viewed more than 13,000 pornographic images in a six-week span.
[...]
In another recent case, a GSA employee who spent about two hours a day on a computer looking at pornography and dating sites “sometimes became bored during these long hours at the computer and would often use the computer for personal use to pass the time,” according to a case report by the GSA inspector general last year.
But what's worse is that those farther up the food chain at these agencies are treating this piss poor excuse as though it's valid -- or at the very least, refusing to take the situation seriously.
Investigations at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Commerce Department and the General Services Administration have turned up similar cases, though memos show the employees rarely face criminal prosecution for time and attendance fraud.So, bored federal employees will continue to surf for porn or otherwise waste tax dollars because there's zero accountability. These stories surface so frequently because an OIG investigation only uncovers wrongdoing. The reports are almost always scathing indictments of federal money being misspent and mismanaged and yet, all the OIG can do is make recommendations. The agencies themselves have to change and they almost universally refuse to do so. The problems are so ingrained at this point that no one wants to make the effort needed to enforce some level of decorum and accountability. Only rarely does external pressure have any influence, and legislators have been hesitant to create additional means of enforcement or deterrence.
A spokesman for the FCC declined to comment on what, if any, action the agency took after the FCC’s inspector general singled out the eight-hour-a-week porn peeper.
FCC spokesman Mark Wigfield said only that the agency follows Office of Personnel Management guidelines on disciplinary matters and officials could not comment on specific cases.
The government mantra seems to be "if it's broke, don't fix it." There's nothing wrong with viewing porn, but there's plenty wrong with using government computers and punching the clock while doing it. If we can't expect lower-level agencies to be accountable to the public, why should we be surprised the administration itself feels exempt from this crucial aspect of democracy as well?
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Filed Under: abuse, federal employees, fraud, waste
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There's no lost and found box
person 1: I fell on it
person 2: I fell on it
person 3: I got bored.
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If the one's who are supposed to be managing their employees, and making sure they aren't wasting time and taxpayer money don't care to do their jobs, name and shame, and see if that gets them to shape up.
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You are assuming that they are not the ones with sticky fingers.
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This is government training exercises. How else are government employees going to learn to f**k the public without proper training?
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Not once
But - I'm prepared to bet that you have done some non-work activity and from the "tax dollars" point of view the exact nature of the non-work activity is surely irrelevant.
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Re: Not once
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Re: Re: Not once
Certainly just about any website could have malware - including news sites. (and not just websites - played any Sony CD's on your work computer?)
Any NSFW site that has a business model that isn't actually based on distributing malware has just a much (if not more) incentive to keep itself free of malware as any other entertainment site.
So absent of actual evidence I'll not accept your point.
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Re: Re: Re: Not once
I think this may explain my point a bit better.
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So the real question is not how come these government employees waste their time on NSFW sites - but rather how come they are actually able to?
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Not once
Those computers are much more likely to have information or access that is valuable. They are much more likely to be a stepping off point to get access to other valuable systems. They are more likely to have more bandwidth available for DDoS or spambot work.
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Agreed - and that is rather the point - because where I work - with websense blocking access to NSFW sites - we were taken down by someone who really should have known better clicking on a link in a spam email!
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Not once
This isn't really a relevant point. There is no security software that is so good that you can feel at ease going to dangerous sites.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Not once
It does - but it is contradicted by this quote from the page linked by the AC below:
"Symantec's Internet Security Threat Report revealed that religious websites have triple the number of virus-related threats than pornographic sites.
"It is interesting to note that websites hosting adult/pornographic content are not in the top five, but ranked tenth," said Symantec in its Internet Security Threat Report. "We hypothesize that this is because pornographic website owners already make money from the Internet and, as a result, have a vested interest in keeping their sites malware-free; it's not good for repeat business."
I think that report was in my memory when I wrote the original comment.
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Re: Re: Not once
http://www.dailytech.com/Symantec+Religious+Websites+More+Likely+to+Infect+Computers+Than+Porn +Sites/article24613.htm
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Re: Re: Re: Not once
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rationale for hiring more female employees
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Re: rationale for hiring more female employees
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The fact that you haven't thought of using your work pc to check some porn at boredom times doesn't mean it doesn't happen everywhere. Some people take cautionary steps and check if the company has filters or conceal the activity. Others don't.
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This kept up until a VP was the biggest offender and then it suddenly stopped.
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Typical. The President of the company was part of this "porn chain".
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Tim obviously has a porn problem
Excuse me Tim?
What kind of a sanctimonious, self-righteous narcissist are you to imply that porn isn't wholesome anytime, anywhere?
Your post FAILS to defend porn. Only a a right-wing, closeted, gay, homophobe (that wants to legislate everyone's morality from the Bohemian Grove bunker built by their 700 Club boyfriends) doesn't fully embrace porn.
Oh and thanks for 8 years of Bush, hater.
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face book
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Waitaminute
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Re: Waitaminute
One thing we know for certain is that porn filters are far more effective at stopping non-porn content than stopping porn.
However, once you interview the guy and he says he perused it “out of boredom”, I think it is safe to say he was surfing porn.
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How exactly do you inactively view pornography? "Yeah, sorry boss. I was looking for a news piece but instead of putting `BBC` I accidentally put`findyourpornhere`Easy mistake, my typing sucks"
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Um... a really inappropriate screen saver?
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By keeping both hands on the keyboard or mouse of course. And sitting still. No moaning either.
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I don't see why that person got away with watching porn. Where I work if you are caught with porn or visiting porn sites you are fired immediately or at the least your computer is taken away and you are reassigned to other work.
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My workplace isn't quite that draconian. If you violate their use policy, you'll get reprimanded. If you do it again, you'll get fired. And it's not just porn -- we're allowed to use the internet for non-work-related reasons, but that use cannot contribute to sexual harassment, a hostile work environment, etc. In other words, it's not about porn, it's about liability. I can't do anything that could get my employer in trouble.
I'm a little (but only a little) surprised that government agencies don't have the same concerns.
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In general there is no problem with stuff like this. The issue is that a small percentage just like every business has people that disregard policy and sometimes the disregard is found moving up the chain of command. In the case of the federal government that small percentage results in a lot of people.
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To me the real issue isn't that they're looking at porn at work (although, come on, really?), it's that they don't have anything to do otherwise. That screams poor management and/or overhiring. My guess is both.
I personally feel, as a government employee, I have an obligation to work hard on the taxpayer's dime. Does that mean I work 100% of the time I'm at the office? No...I occasionally write posts on Techdirt =). But for the most part when I'm at work I'm doing something productive.
The fact that these guys can go to work all day with nothing to do is terrible, and means that we either need to cut down the number of employees at these places or find a better way to employ them.
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Perhaps the first thing you do when working for government is get the dirt on your bosses as part of ensuring job and pension security since the implication is that productively working is seldom required. I wouldn't know.
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How can they view porn at work?
I would take this to mean the network admins aren't doing their job. It's their job to make sure non work sites are blocked, especially ones with malware. After all, you shouldn't blame a kid for eating a cookie if the parent leaves an open package on the table.
And the issue of whether reputable porn sites do or do not have malware is irrelevant since people (especially government workers) shouldn't be looking at it at work in the first place.
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Re: How can they view porn at work?
Lots of places don't use such filters. Personally, I've never actually worked anywhere that uses them.
"It's their job to make sure non work sites are blocked, especially ones with malware."
It's only their job if the company says it's their job. There are TONS of problems with these filters that can cause real problems getting work done, which is why lots of places don't use them.
The malware situation is better handled outside of blocking web sites anyway (even 100% legitimate websites are sometimes the source of malware). Every place I've works does scan the internet traffic for malware and blocks it when its spotted. This is done without site-level blocking, as it should be.
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