Slashdot Mirror
Porn Surfing Rampant At US Science Foundation
schwit1 writes "The Washington Times reports, '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.' One senior executive at the National Science Foundation spent at least 331 days looking at pornography on his government computer, records show. The cost to taxpayers: up to $58,000. Why aren't they running a product like Websense?"
that the guy almost used a "think of the children" defense for his actions. now THAT's fucked up.
these young women are from poor countries and need to make money to help their parents
THL phish sticks
Did he spend 331 days, or did he check at some point every day he was at work?
Once we get past "surfed porn at work", the number of hours seems more relvent than the number of days.
It all started out as innocent research on "Black Holes" and "Uranus"...
Why aren't they running a product like Websense?"
First this is coming from the Washington Times. Its the newspaper equivalent of Fox News.
Second this was reported back in January 2009.
http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=NSF+porn+surfing&scoring=a&hl=en&ned=us&um=1&sa=N&sugg=d&as_ldate=2000&as_hdate=2009&lnav=hist9
To begin with, this is a senior executive, not some lowly password changer in the basement. The policy against surfing porn at work may apply to all equally, but as we all know, some are more equal than others. So it's hard to expect that this person would somehow be subject to the rules considering his position.
Second, what's wrong with surfing porn at work? Work is a stressful environment, and finding ways to relieve this stress is actually a productive endeavor. Many companies have put in "game rooms" with pool tables and other recreational apparatus to help employees work off some stress and be more productive at their jobs. If porn helped this senior exec relieve stress and be more productive, then it's a good deal for the agency.
If someone is somehow offended by the viewing of porn, I suggest they give proof that they were forced to view it with the boss. Otherwise, even if they viewed it incidentally, their is no evidence that this exec was using the porn in a harassing way. If the porn itself wasn't illegal, then what's the big deal?
I guess they'd better create an internal division called the National Science Foundation Watchdog, or NSFW for short...
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Play Six Pack Man. I
Well, this is reported by the Washington Times, so you know it's not biased in the least. OK, let's take a look.
The only substantive abuse claim here is a quote from the NSF's inspector general making a budget request to Congress. The Times article implies that "this dramatic increase," forcing fraud detection efforts to be reduced, refers to employees browsing porn.
But that's not the case, is it. If we read the Times article very carefully, we see that the very first graf references:
Subsequent references to "the problems," "this dramatic increase," and "the misconduct cases" are all really talking about employee misconduct as a whole, not porn surfing specifically.
Maybe that's why this article is big on rhetoric and small on actual cases. One lengthy case is detailed on the article's first page. How much did that case cost taxpayers? "Between $13,800 and $58,000." Out of the NSF's $6.49 billion budget. That's 0.0006%.
How often is "often"? Six times as often as before. Misconduct cases -- not porn specifically -- went from 3 in 2006, to 7 in 2007, to 10 in 2008. The Times hints repeatedly that this is a huge problem, but despite its lavish use of adjectives -- "pervasive," "swamped," "well-publicized" -- it has to report that the actual number of porn-related misconduct cases in 2008 was seven.
Slashdot's headline "Porn Surfing Rampant" is exactly the kind of exaggeration that the Washington Times was hoping secondary media would slap on this story. "Rampant" is just not true, there's no possible way seven cases in a year can be described that way.
If each case was as bad as the one "between $13,800 and $58,000" case that was identified, those seven cases probably cost 0.004% of the NSF's budget.
But the Times article gets worse, moving from exaggeration to outright lies. Later, its author Jim McElhatton writes:
That's a flat-out lie. The OIG told Congress it was diverted by "employee misconduct," not porn. Here, read the actual budget request. (Full quote below.)
There is one paragraph in a 7-page report that references employee misconduct, and nowhere are "porn cases" referenced. Surely some of the cost to the agency was specifically from porn-surfing misconduct. And some was not. How much? We still don't know.
Look, any major institution, private or public, that employs a large number of people and gives them access to the internet, is going to have a few employees who abuse that access. It's ridiculous to think otherwise. Employees are capable of wasting time in a wide variety of creative ways. I daresay some employees in the private sector are wasting time reading Slashdot right at this very moment when they are nominally getting paid to do other things.
Republicans aren't fans of science; we know that. Smearing the NSF in the media by associating their name with porn for a news cycle is a fun yuk I suppose, but for conservatives it's another shot fired in the culture war. I find it depressing. There's actual news out there; this is at best People magazine type crap.
And it's ironic that this gets spread over the internet that the NSF helped create, and the story is brought to you thanks to the Freedom of Information Act that was passed by Democrats over the objections of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Scalia.
Finally, as someone who 10 years ago was writing stories for Slashdot
We all know if you count your 'visits' by the day it seems to have big implications. But lets be realistic here. We all know you only visit for between 2-5 minutes.
Erring on the high side... 5 x 331 = 1655 minutes = 27.6 hours. And if we consider it work days, (about 8 hours), then that's actually hardly over 3 days.
Exaggerate much? Oh, but we wanted the headlines so so bad; we had to make it look big! (sarcasm)
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And right now, somewhere, people are reading this and frowining-- all the while having recently masturbated at work. Yes, everyone's shit still stinks. Yes, we all tug it. I wonder how much human time has been wasted worrying about this petty garble; consider the average time it takes to read and the average number of slashdot headline readers and I bet we're well over 27.6 hours!
I wouldn't recommend Websense to anyone. They have a long history of stealth web robots which intentionally disobey the robots.txt standard.
Your friend has a "supervisor of porn"? I'm envious
and on page 2 it says "foundation's inspector general closed 10 employee misconduct investigations last year, up from just three in 2006. "
Ten staff were caught, out of a total of 1200. That's "all pervasive"? It's less than 1%. That "swamped" the investigators?
Investigate how productive these investigators are, that sounds more like the story.
And what the hell does that phrase "senior executive who spent at least 331 days looking at pornography" mean? He spent 8 hours a day for a almost a year looking at porn? Or does it actually mean he looked at porn at least once on 331 days? Some people take a smoke break, others take a coffee break, maybe he took porn breaks. How much time did he actually waste, and is that the issue or is it "PORN"? He's an adult, everyone in the office is an adult, and if anyone had been disturbed by his habit, I'm sure we would have heard all about it.
And on page three: The report caught the attention of Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee... Right, this story was sourced from the "ranking Republican" on the committee. So we can be sure he has no agenda to embarrass the government by turning this trivial misconduct of a dozen staff into a "scandal".
It's completely beyond my comprehension why anyone would think it's ok to surf for porn at work. Clearly common sense is no longer a factor in hiring.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."