Employee misconduct investigations, often involving workers accessing pornography from their government computers, grew sixfold last year inside the taxpayer-funded foundation that doles out billions of dollars of scientific research grants, according to budget documents and other records obtained by The Washington Times.
The problems at the National Science Foundation (NSF) were so pervasive they swamped the agency’s inspector general and forced the internal watchdog to cut back on its primary mission of investigating grant fraud and recovering misspent tax dollars.
[Investigators] uncovered evidence that an employee who was still in his probationary period had used his SEC laptop computer to attempt to access Internet websites classified as containing pornography, resulting in hundreds of access denials. The OIG investigation also disclosed that this employee successfully bypassed the Commission’s Internet filter by using a flash drive.
Yes, the Bush-era SEC was so busy looking at internet porn (and running their private businesses from their government offices) that they had no time to prevent an economic meltdown. There were also two NASA employees facing prison time for downloading child pornography to their computers in 2007. What’s new about this?
Pornography is an endemic part of the internet; that doesn’t go away even when you don’t work for the government. Indeed, private corporations have dealt with this problem for years. It affects every sector of the economy: in July 2007, Consumerist.com caught Geek Squad copying porn from clients’ computers. The explosion of mobile platforms has multiplied the problems. One study in the UK found that seven out of ten firms have a major problem with employee porn consumption at work.
Yet how many private companies publish the results of their efforts to bust employees for looking at porn on company time and bandwidth? Better yet, how many take calls about it from the Washington Times?
