High-Level DOJ Official Latest Gov't Employee To Be Caught Watching Porn While On The Clock

from the it's-always-those-wankers-up-top,-he-said-literally dept

It's good to know government employees are hard at work. (This statement mainly applies to male employees.)

Throughout the past several years, internal investigations have rooted out a bunch of government employees who are wasting tax dollars by visiting websites and viewing content no doubt strictly prohibited by workplace policies. We're talking porn. Lots of porn. Just incredible amounts of porn consumption.

These apparently non-essential personnel have racked up some amazing porn stats. Some SEC employees were reprimanded (but not fired) for spending up to 98% of their workdays watching porn. An employee at the US Geological Survey's [cough] EROS Center visited 9,000 porn webpages en route to infecting the agency's computer system with malware. An EPA employee spent their work hours compiling a comprehensive library of over 9,000 pornographic images.

It's not just the federal government either. The City of Baltimore's Department of Public Works discovered an employee was spending about half the work week (~20 hours) watching porn on the clock. Over in the UK -- home of the always-impending porn filters -- government employees accessed porn 300,000 times over a 14-month period.

Porn consumption is apparently a government tradition -- one that spans the world and is celebrated by all levels of governing bodies.

Here's yet another data point, emanating from the US Department of Justice. (via NextGov)

The DOJ's Inspector General was tipped to some in-office porn viewing by a high-ranking official. This was no office drone. This was a Deputy Assistant Attorney General. Its investigation confirmed what was suspected: more porn consumption on a government computer.

From the one-page summary [PDF] released by the OIG:

The OIG investigation substantiated the allegation that the then DAAG viewed sexually explicit images on the DAAG’s government computers, in violation of DOJ policy. An OIG forensic examination of two DOJ computers issued to the DAAG determined that the computers contained data regarding numerous sexually explicit website searches, visits to websites hosting sexually explicit videos, sexually explicit search engine terms, and sexually explicit images.

The DAAG then lied about their porn habits. This is a bold move, considering lying to investigators is a criminal offense. Of course, it's only the rarest of government officials who are ever charged with lying to investigators. This one was no exception. The DAAG resigned before the investigation was concluded and no criminal charges were brought.

That's the quality of help we're paying for. They're people who should be held to a higher standard than private sector employees. But they never are. Fireable offenses rarely result in firing. Massive amounts of wasted time result in reprimands, rather than demotions or termination. And yet, we're supposed to act like the government has our best interests in mind when it engages in a tiny bit of oversight. These employees and their enablers are jerking far more than themselves around.

Filed Under: doj, porn, waste

DailyDirt: Reusing Plastic Instead Of Throwing It All Away...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Disposable packaging adds up to a lot of trash. Sure, some of it gets recycled, but there's a significant amount that doesn't -- and ends up polluting the environment in mind-boggling ways. In the not-so-distant future, we might have more plastic in the ocean by weight than fish. But it doesn't have to be that way.

• Making comfortable running shoes from plastic recycled from old fishing nets retrieved from the coast of Africa isn't the easiest way to recycle, but it might be one of the more fashionable ways. Adidas is only making 50 pairs of shoes made with this kind of recycled plastic, so it's nowhere near a sustainable manufacturing process. However, using more recycled plastics in fashionable items could catch on -- if it can be done economically. [url]
• Do you have any idea what all those plastic recycling numbers mean? A bunch of common plastics that make up everyday containers can also be useful prototyping materials, so check out this brief guide to prototyping materials for which plastics might be suitable for DIY projects. [url]
• Plastic garbage floating on water might be gathered up more easily with a "tractor beam" of small artificial surface waves. It would probably be a bit difficult to overcome the natural waves in the oceans to clean up garbage, but this is analogous to how trash in ocean gyres came about in the first place. [url]

After you've finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

Filed Under: cleanup, garbage, ocean gyre, plastics, pollution, recycling, tractor beam, waste
Companies: adidas

DailyDirt: Plastic Is Everywhere, Run For Your Lives

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Plastic is a relatively new material in our environment, but many kinds of plastic don't decompose -- so it sticks around for a long, long time. But it's so useful -- and who wants to drag around metal or glass bottles? (Ahem, even if you did, many glass/metal bottles are lined with plastic anyway.) We could do a better job of recycling plastic and making sure plastic doesn't end up in the ocean, but we'll probably never get rid of plastic unless we run out of oil.

• Making plastic without chemicals that have estrogenic activity can be done, but some chemical companies are still fighting to make their competitor's products look bad. The dose makes the poison, and what you don't realize is that iocane powder is present in all plastic water bottles. [url]
• An estimated 4.8 to 12.7 million metric tons of plastic waste entered the ocean in 2010. This estimate is also probably a bit low because it only counts the plastic that is buoyant in seawater. [url]
• The FDA says BPA from polycarbonate plastic in beverage containers and food packaging is safe. Go ahead and avoid plastic if you want to, but there are probably worse things in your food. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: bpa, chemistry, estrogenic activity, plastic, polycarbonate, waste

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.

[...]

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Filed Under: abuse, federal employees, fraud, waste

DailyDirt: Making Use Of Food Waste

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

A terrible amount of our food supply goes to waste. It's not just unsold produce that rots in a grocery store. All along our food chain, we throw away edible material. Efforts to reclaim those loses are sometimes met with some disgust (eg. pink slime), but finding uses for food stuff that would otherwise end up in landfill should be a noble pursuit. Here are just a few projects that could eat up some of our uneaten leftovers.

• Black soldier flies could be used to eat all kinds of biowaste -- from brewer's grain (leftover from beer making) to slaughterhouse waste. These insects are more efficient than rendering plants, and then their protein-rich bodies can be fed to farm animals. [url]
• In the UK, there's a online marketplace for food that is beyond its advertised "sell by" date. The food is perfectly safe to eat, and this site was really popular during the Great Recession. [url]
• Some food waste is being processed into biofuel and other chemicals. Starbucks Hong Kong and The Climate Group are working together to find ways to re-use coffee grounds and waste baked goods. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: biofuel, biowaste, black soldier fly, expired food, food, leftovers, rendering plant, the climate group, waste
Companies: starbucks

Feds Seize 46 Domains... And Then Let Them All Expire Two Weeks Later

from the tax-payer-money-at-work dept

We've written plenty about our concerns with the federal government seizing domains, sometimes on very questionable evidence. The worst of the worst of this was with the completely bogus seizure of the hiphop blog Dajaz1 -- which the government held for over a year, before sheepishly handing it back and never actually filing any lawsuit. There was also, of course, the seizure of Rojadirecta, whose owners actually sued the federal government in response, leading the government to bluster about for a bit, before realizing it was about to get trampled in court and handing back the domain name to get out of the case. Since then, it appears that the government has been at least a bit more careful before seizing some domains (the Megaupload case may be an exception...), but it still seems highly questionable that the government even can seize a domain. The seizure process, remember, is generally supposed to be to prevent evidence from getting destroyed (or hidden), but that's unlikely with a domain name. Furthermore, there's a heightened standard for seizures if they could impact free speech rights -- and a domain name almost certainly does exactly that.

But, even worse, the feds really seem quite clueless at times in their domain seizing. The latest, as pointed out to us by Paul Keating, is that the feds had seized 46 domains on July 4th. Unlike the other domain seizure cases we've discussed, these weren't about intellectual property issues, but were apparently related to the US government shutting down Liberty Reserve for money laundering. However, there's an additional oddity. Just two weeks after all 46 of those domains were seized, the feds let them all expire, at which point they went back on the market. The feds, if they had done any investigation, had to know that those domains were about to expire. There was little worry that Liberty Reserve was going to do anything at all with them, seeing as the government had already shut that down. So, why bother seizing the domains just to hold them for two weeks... and then let them expire and go back on the market? Is this really the kind of thing we want our taxpayer funds to cover? Investigating and seizing domain names to release them immediately after?

Filed Under: dhs, domain seizures, expiration, waste

Congressional Investigation Slams DHS Anti-Terror Centers: Wasted Taxpayer Funds, Created No Useful Intelligence & Violated Civil Liberties

from the have-we-done-anything-useful? dept

Since September 11th, the government has often had something of a blank check (and the equivalent lack of oversight) for anything labeled as being part of an anti-terror effort. As such, it should hardly come as a surprise that programs are wasteful, possibly fraudulent, bad for civil liberties and (oh yeah) completely useless (to actively harmful) in fighting terrorism. A Congressional investigation into the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) "fusion centers," which were supposed to be a key force in anti-terrorism efforts, presents an absolutely scathing condemnation of the effort.

The Subcommittee investigation found that DHS-assigned detailees to the fusion centers forwarded "intelligence" of uneven quality - oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens' civil liberties and Privacy Act protections, occasionally taken from already-published public sources, and more often than not unrelated to terrorism. The Subcommittee investigation also found that DHS officials' public claims about fusion centers were not always accurate. For instance, DHS officials asserted that some fusion centers existed when they did not. At times, DHS officials overstated fusion centers' "success stories." At other times, DHS officials failed to disclose or acknowledge non-public evaluations highlighting a host of problems at fusion centers and in DHS' own operations.

Oh, and did we mention how wasteful they were? Apparently, taxpayer money simply "disappeared" into the program often being spent on totally unrelated things like flat screen TVs:

The Subcommittee investigation also reviewed how the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), a component of DHS, distributed hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to support state and local fusion centers. DHS revealed that it was unable to provide an accurate tally of how much it had granted to states and cities to support fusion centers efforts, instead producing broad estimates of the total amount of federal dollars spent on fusion center activities from 2003 to 2011, estimates which ranged from $289 million to $1.4 billion. The Subcommittee investigation also found that DHS failed to adequately police how states and municipalities used the money intended for fusion centers. The investigation found that DHS did not know with any accuracy how much grant money it has spent on specific fusion centers, nor could it say how most of those grant funds were spent, nor has it examined the effectiveness of those grant dollars. The Subcommittee conducted a more detailed case study review of expenditures of DHS grant funds at five fusion centers, all of which lacked basic, "must-have" intelligence capabilities, according to assessments conducted by and for DHS. The Subcommittee investigation found that the state and local agencies used some of the federal grant money to purchase: dozens of flat-screen TVs; Sport Utility Vehicles they then gave away to other local agencies; and hidden "shirt button" cameras, cell phone tracking devices, and other surveillance equipment unrelated to the analytical mission of a fusion center.

Of course, this kind of thing isn't all that uncommon. I remember a story from nearly a decade ago about all the money designated for things like E911 services, instead being used to pay for boots and pens. We recently wrote about the failure of a NY City program to spy on Muslims to turn up a single lead, but this takes that kind of failure to a whole new level.

Of course, the scary part in all this isn't just the misuse of funds or the failure to produce anything relevant. It's that what was done almost certainly violated the public's rights. And apparently, such violations of civil liberties were a very common problem.

The inappropriate reporting appears to have been a regular problem. An April 2009 email from an alarmed senior I&A official stated: “[State and Local Fusion Center officials] are collecting open-source intelligence (OSINT) on U.S. persons (USPER), without proper vetting, and improperly reporting this information through homeland information reporting (HIR) channels,” wrote Barbara Alexander, then director of the Collection and Requirements Division, which oversaw HIR reporting. “The improper reporting of this information through HIR channels is likely a result of a lack of training on proper collection and reporting procedures . . . they are inadvertently causing problems.” In an interview with the Subcommittee, Ms. Alexander said she recalled being told the Reporting Branch was “flooded” with inappropriate reporting. “A lot of information was coming in inappropriately,” she remembered. “The information was not reportable.”

[....] Ms. Schlanger’s presentation, a copy of which DHS provided to the Subcommittee, indicated that areas in which DHS intelligence reporters had overstepped legal boundaries included: Reporting on First Amendment-protected activities lacking a nexus to violence or criminality; reporting on or improperly characterizing political, religious or ideological speech that is not explicitly violent or criminal; and attributing to an entire group the violent or criminal acts of one or a limited number of the group’s members.

The investigation goes on to quote numerous examples of "reports" prepared on information that DHS is not allowed to report on as it violates civil liberties.

In the end, as with so many "anti-terror" programs, what we have is a program that took in a ton of taxpayer funds, with almost no oversight as to what happened to those funds (leading to $1.4 billion disappearing), no intelligence of any use but undertook plenty of efforts that were clearly beyond the mandate of Homeland Security. And all of this is supposed to make us feel safer?

Filed Under: abuse, civil liberties, congress, dhs, fusion centers, homeland security, terrorism, waste

Congress: The TSA Is Wasting Hundreds Of Millions In Taxpayer Dollars

from the oversight-indeed dept

The House Oversight Committee has come out with a report slamming the TSA for tremendous amounts of waste, specifically in the "deployment and storage" of its scanning equipment. Basically, it sounds like the TSA likes to go on giant spending sprees, buying up security equipment and then never, ever using it. A few data points

• As of February 15, 2012, the total value of TSA’s equipment in storage was, according to TSA officials, estimated at $184 million. However, when questioned by Committee staff, TSA’s warehouse staff and procurement officials were unable to provide the total value of equipment in storage.
• Committee staff discovered that 85% of the approximately 5,700 major transportation security equipment currently warehoused at the TLC had been stored for longer than six months; 35% of the equipment had been stored for more than one year. One piece of equipment had been in storage more than six years – 60% of its useful life.
• As of February 2012, Committee staff discovered that TSA had 472 Advanced Technology 2 (AT2) carry-on baggage screening machines at the TLC and that more than 99% have remained in storage for more than nine months; 34% of AT2s have been stored for longer than one year.
• TSA knowingly purchased more Explosive Trace Detectors (ETDs) than were necessary in order to receive a bulk discount under an incorrect and baseless assumption that demand would increase. TSA management stated: “[w]e purchased more than we needed in order to get a discount.”

Oh yeah, and it appears that the TSA isn't very good at tracking this stuff. When asked about the total cost of managing this equipment, the TSA was unable to provide an answer. And then it appeared to willfully mislead Congress about this:

• TSA intentionally delayed Congressional oversight of the Transportation Logistics Center and provided inaccurate, incomplete, and potentially misleading information to Congress in order to conceal the agency’s continued mismanagement of warehouse operations.
• TSA willfully delayed Congressional oversight of the agency’s Transportation Logistics Center twice in a failed attempt to hide the disposal of approximately 1,300 pieces of screening equipment from its warehouses in Dallas, Texas, prior to the arrival of Congressional staff.
• TSA potentially violated 18 U.S.C. Sec. 1001, by knowingly providing an inaccurate warehouse inventory report to Congressional staff that accounted for the disposal of equipment that was still in storage at the TLC during a site visit by Congressional staff.
• TSA provided Congressional staff with a list of disposed equipment that falsely identified disposal dates and directly contradicted the inventory of equipment in the Quarterly Warehouse Inventory Report provided to Committee staff on February 13, 2012.

One of the theories that was floated a few years ago when there was that big rush to rollout the nudie scanners, was that much of it was being driven by fear mongering from former government officials, like Michael Chertoff, who had economic relationships with the makers of the equipment. This report doesn't confirm any of that, but it sure seems to fit that narrative pretty perfectly. Fear monger away, have the TSA buy a ton of questionable equipment it doesn't actually need, and then have much of that equipment just sit in a warehouse. All on the taxpayers' dime.

Filed Under: congress, house oversight committee, michael chertoff, scanners, tsa, waste