Bend Over: 41 DC Workers Fired Or Suspended For Porn Surfing
They got some ’splaining to do…
WASHINGTON - Now that 41 District workers have been fired or suspended after visiting pornographic Web sites on government computers, the city is cranking up the technology to keep an eye on all government computers.
“We have a system for tracking people’s use and redirecting people’s computers away from those sites, to get people back to work, serving the citizens of the District of Columbia,” says D.C. City Administrator Dan Tangherlini.
Yeah! Quit whacking off at work, would ya, Harry?
Before its investigation, D.C. could track 10,000 computers. Now the city can monitor 30,000.
“Content will be filtered. Those sites will be blocked and re-directed to our policy of appropriate use,” says Chief Technology Officer Vivek Kundra.
“Appropriate Use” is a relative term.
Rather than just have a policy on paper, every time a city worker logs in on a city computer, he’ll see a warning about inappropriate computer use.
The District fired nine employees and suspended 32 employees during its investigation. The fired employees include men and women, but officials would not say how many.
D.C. officials are continuing their investigation and say more employees may be fired or suspended.
An internal investigation by the Office of the Chief Technology Officer revealed 20,000 hits from pornographic Web sites on the nine fired employees’ computers in 2007.
The Chief said he personally had to pore over hours and hours worth of downloaded pornography. “It was rough,” he said.
The 32 suspended employees accessed pornographic Web sites 2,000 times in 2007, the investigation found.
Of the fired employees’ estimated 200 work days a year, the investigation showed that they visited pornographic Web sites 100 times per day, Mayor Adrian Fenty says.
What arethey on? I want some.
Employees from 18 city agencies, including the Office of the Attorney General, were accessing pornographic or sexual Web sites.
D.C. Attorney General Peter Nickles says the employees’ actions are egregious.
“It’s outrageous that people should access hard-core pornography, but to do it on government time…,” Nickles says. “This will not be tolerated in our government, and least of all in the Office of the Attorney General.”
“By crackie.”
The investigation began on Dec. 15 after the Office of Property Management received a complaint from an employee about other employees browsing and downloading pornographic content on government computers.
(WTOP)
Bash Note: All bold words in this story were added by me, they were not part of the original story. >:-D
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This is not surprising. Most companies have a Computer Use statement that employees sign when they join a company. If those rules are changed, the employee is informed about those changes and may be required to re-sign the new statement.
Also most companies have a “No Trespassing” statement on their machines prior to login and that statement outlines the fact that you are being monitored.
Employees according to the courts have no expectation of privacy once they login to a company network.
Lastly, downloading porno at work…depending on what it is can get a company into trouble and may cause a downstream liability issue.
Finally, it takes up bandwidth, that other employees might need to do their work. It taxes the network unnecessarily.
Besides all that, it shows that many in DC are shamming instaed of working. Which of course is a “duh” issue if you live inside the beltway.
January 24th, 2008 at 4:14 pmForget everything else: 100x a day?!?!?!
January 24th, 2008 at 5:04 pmHi, Pat- Here’s more to the story, as I blogged today: http://tinyurl.com/38cpha
Thanks. Jon Katz, Underdog Blog
January 30th, 2008 at 9:24 am