Slashdot Mirror
Economy Tanked While Government Surfed Porn
unixan writes "In a report by the SEC Inspector General that smacks of fiddling while Rome burns, 33 recent ethics investigations all showed that the government employees responsible for keeping an eye on the economy were instead obsessed with surfing porn — while the economy was tipping over. One cited example: 'A senior attorney at the SEC's Washington headquarters spent up to eight hours a day looking at and downloading pornography. When he ran out of hard drive space, he burned the files to CDs or DVDs, which he kept in boxes around his office.'"
... government employees responsible for keeping an eye on the economy were instead obsessed with surfing porn ...
So when they were studying boobs online they should have been studying the boobs that were busy running/ruining our financial and housing industries? Understandable how those orders could get confused.
About 16 percent of men with Internet access at work admit to looking at online porn while at the office, according to a 2006 survey by Websense Inc.
Look at the man in the cubicle across from you. Now look at the two men to the left of you. Now look at the two men to the right of you. One of them is surfing porn at work.*
* Unless it's you. And if it is you, how stupid are you? Seriously? Seriously you'd jeopardize your job for that?
My work here is dung.
And we surf slashdot rather than doing our own jobs
Any non-work internet activity is risking ones job.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Wow, talk about bureaucracy. There's no way I would have gotten away with downloading that much on a work connection, even if it was Linux ISOs or legal, harmless data. How did these guys get away with it for so long? Let's say this guy had a 500 GB hard drive...then stacks of DVDs at 4.7 GB each...that's a lot of smut a day. My network admins would have been knocking on my office door. Once they found out what it was, I'd never find a job again.
Something tells me the network admins for that government department must have been doing the same thing, or were incompetent, or playing WoW (or maybe some hellish combination).
As of 2007, the SEC employed 3798 people. They found 33 cases of apparently habitual porn surfing (I get the impression a single visit didn't count, but visiting a few times a week would get noticed). Is it actually news that ~1% of *any* organization consisting primarily of office workers with internet connections would surf for porn? Finding 1% of any given population with no damn common sense or self control is trivial. I'm not sure how it's any different because the SEC numbers are known.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
Yep - watching people screwing, while the people they are supposed to be watching are screwing the public. Which makes the SEC like the glory hole in Wall Street.
The Invisible Hand of the Free Market is what punches workers in the nuts.
These poor bastards are going to be burned at the afraid-of-sexuality stake, instead of the do-your-damn-job-instead-of-goofing-off stake. They deserve to be fired like any other idiot who goofs off, but I'm sure they're going to be charged with sex crimes of some sort.
"Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad." [Ecclesiastes 7:3]
Would the economy be OK now? Just asking.....
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
This puritan interpretation is just dumb.
Porn did not kill the economy, the SEC has way more than 30 employees. C'mon.... If porn was such a baaaad thing, no company would be doing anything and the economy wouldve.... oh wait!
NO SIG
I'm sure IT was well aware of the situation by the time the hard drive was full.
Who watches the watchers? Ceiling cat does.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
As far as anyone can tell, not one of these people were fired for both not doing their job and for using work equipment in a HIGHLY non-work related manner.
Then again, we have the same thing around here. We know for a fact and have documented at least two people repeatedly, for over half an hour each day for months on end, trying to access porn and porn-related sites. Yet, like the SEC, none have been canned.
To use a tired comment, there used to be a time when one could work hard, get recognized and advance ones career through such work. No longer. Apparently failure is the new success.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
like a troll.
A) DO you think people watch the economy by looking out a window? no. It's worded like the think the economy is in a box and people are just watching in case it finds a way out.
B) They have no way of knowing what's going on in every board room in the financial industry
c) IT's a large organization, of course some people where surfing porn. People are people.
D) None of this excuse what they did. I'm only pointing out that just because it's "the government" doesn't mean the people running it aren't people.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Kind of like reading /. at work?
"What is there a tank on the boat? WHY IS THERE A TANK ON THE BOAT?!?" L4D2
When I was interning at the VA I noticed that one of the public computers for the vets to use had spyware on it. IT was contacted, ran their one program, but the spyware was still there. They said that's all they can do. Government IT people don't go crazy by not realizing that their marching orders are insane. Also have no undergrad at all probably doesn't help.
If this is that big a deal, I hope nobody finds out I've actually been having sex while the economy tanks.
Especially my wife.
Just a quick reminder to anyone thinking of condeming these people here on Slashdot - are you at work right now, reading Slashdot? Is that what you're paid for? The article reeks of sensationalism just because these people happened to be viewing porn instead of reading news, flicking through a book, watching YouTube, or a thousand and one other things that people do every day at work instead of actually working.
You can advertise in this sig from as little as £99.99 a month!
I'm glad I don't work where you do.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
... is that they wanted to diddle while rome burned?
Obviously, some organizations are just sclerotic and incompetent. Being a complex system is, actually, pretty tricky. However, some organizations are that way by design.
In this case, was the SEC basically just incompetent, or was their incompetence tolerated, abetted, nurtured by those who really didn't want them to find anything?
After all, in retrospect, it is fairly obvious that much of the apparent prosperity of the last decade or so was a bubble. Consumer spending based on imaginary wealth provided by homes appraised for large numbers, GDP numbers based on rampant construction of housing stock that nobody could actually afford to live in, various quite sophisticated flavors of financial chicanery and shell-gaming on Wall Street. Now, if you suspect that you are in a bubble, you have the option of trying to pop it before it gets any bigger, which provides the best long term outcome; but generally involves having it burst in your face, or riding it, and hoping that you can make it out of office/retire/move to a new job/cash out a big stack/etc. before it bursts. If you aren't excessively burdened in the ethics department, the latter is pretty sensible.
In situations where you cannot, for political reasons, eliminate a regulatory body outright, there are various ways of quietly gutting it. Just cutting its budget usually helps, appointing an incompetent crony to mismanage it also works pretty well(and rewards a crony), I suspect that allowing incompetence to fester probably works to.
Did the SEC manage to fuck up on its own, or was it permitted and tacitly encouraged to, since an SEC was needed; but nobody really wanted it to find anything?
Wrong. One of them *has* surfed porn at work at some point. They are not doing it necessarily right now. Times were different a few years ago when internet traffic was not routinely monitored and we had offices where no one could see our monitors.
Hell, I worked in a small office where the owner routinely mailed porn to everyone who worked there. I was asked about how I felt about porn when I interviewed there (in '96).
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
the SEC is the host of our Strategic Porn Reserves. Then you'll thank that attorney's forward-thinking approach to preserving a domestic supply to reduce our vulnerability to the whims of foreign porn suppliers.
The SEC's job was to go after fraud and general theft; they didn't do their job. The fact that a lot of them were caught surfing for pron isn't the point; the point is that they were not doing their jobs and the consequences were for the most part, felt by other people.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Surfed porn? Really. You couldnt find any better word that would rhyme with tanked. Sheesh.
Yeah this is shocking given the typical government network is locked down to the Nth degree. When I contracted on site for the Dept. of Health they actually cut me off from the network because I used torrent to download a Linux ISO. I violated policy and it cut off soon after the download started, and the jack went dead. It wasn't just "you can't surf the internet anymore". It was "VIOLATER! KILL HIM!" and I got dressed down soon after. So they closely monitored it.
That's why they are studying them.
Haha...Get it?
(It's a penis joke)
Unless you consider and can justify reading /. as part of your job (keeping abreast on technology news)...
I cant believe people fill up their hardrives with the stuff. I mean porn is fine and all, but how much do you need. Are you ever going to go back and look at your archived porn. I mean, I can understand having some archived that particularly turns you on, or downloading some that you might look at later and then delete, but archiving hundreds of gigs of porn?
I just don't get it. Its not like there is going to be a shortage all of a sudden.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
"Economy Tanked while the Government Wanked."
~Sticky
//No Karma, cause I stoled it.
You'd be surprised at what people get away with in corporations. This really isn't that surprising. People are just like 'ZOMG its gov't failure' instead of 'ZOMG it people failure'. I bet many large companies would have similar statistics (sadly).
or the guy had enough bureaucratic weight that it would flatten anyone that spoke up about it...
heck, sometimes i suspect the office rats that do not get replaced during a election cycle either collect stuff they can leak on a "temporary" boss in case he becomes to uppity, or just wait the term out and then go back to business as usual if said boss got voted out of office.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
FTFA:
Anyone want to bet that certain right-wing news outlets are furiously trying to figure out a way to blame this on President Obama?
A certain right wing news outlet? How about Slashdot? Where in the summary does it mention that this happened under Bush? Nowhere, it says 'recent.' This is meant to spread FUD about the SEC, in order to turn people against the idea of financial reform and regulation. "Why, if these fools are constantly surfing porn, how can we trust them to regulate Wall Street?" But they aren't anymore: the fellow appointed by this administration cracked down and stopped it.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
This sounds very erudite and post-contemporary, but it's also nonsensical cruft.
Playing Tetris is slacking off. Browsing porn at work is a sign of really, really questionable, almost "flaming out" judgment.
I guarantee you that any competant IT department would not only be fully aware of what was going on, but also smart enough not to stir a pot that big.
If I came in tomorrow and the entire sales team was found to be mass downloading pron, what could we do? Get the entire team fired? Who is going to pick up the slack from that? Can't just replace people just like that. We could filter their content, but how long before that becomes a headache when they can't reach legit sites. We can throttle them but then there are complaints that they can't get any work done while they are chewing through bandwidth on a bit-torrent.
IT's job is to make sure that everyone is up and running. Its the managers job to make sure that people are doing their work. When people start treating IT like a police force, then something is seriously wrong, and you need to look at the power structure and layout of your company. We can be eyes and ears, we can inform managers, but its definately NOT our job to go and get people fired.
Boy, they sure took the Bush agenda seriously.
--
Toro
keeping abreast on technology news
I see what you did there...
should they have, god forbid, attempted to * gasp * regulate wall street while wall street was doing all those scams ?
all in a country, and a political environment which have been brainwashed to the core by decades of yelps of "deregulation - you'll cost americans jobs !!" ?
and all the while having a right wing, 'hands off business' administration looming over their head ?
how many of you would dare attempt do actually, god forbid, do your job and try to question wall street in such an environment, and lose all future career options, even if not directly your job ? note that you would probably lose your job, had it been under bush administration, flat out.
even the most left wing politicians were not able to dare speak against wall street, and this 'deregulation - hands off' business, until it became as clear as day that wall street actually perpetrated scams. EVEN during the period wall street was dragging all the world down, there were still 'experts', 'pundits' who were coming up in news channels and delivering opinion on how this was not a crisis and no regulation was needed and attacking whomever dare talked about any regulation. remember how peter schiff was ridiculed right 2-3 months after crisis, despite all the stuff he has said has come to pass and he was right.
leave it aside, there are STILL some totally out of touch right wingers coming up in senate or house floor, and saying 'deregulation', even after it came out that goldman sachs actually perpetrated not 1, but 5 different kinds of scam in one mortgage backed hedge fund.
so, tell me, what would you do in such an environment, if you were them ?
you would watch porn. or play games. because, noone who put you there, wanted you to do your job.
Read radical news here
that "Fanny May" was not a porn star.
Sheila Bair hasn't enforced the (non-discretionary) Prompt Corrective Action law on any of the largest TBTF banks.
Henry Paulson lobbied for the repeal of the last vestiges of Glass-Steagall while he worked for Goldman Sachs and then committed extortion by threatening Congress with martial law unless they handed over $700 billion to a group of unapprehended felons.
The FBI warned about about an epidemic of mortgage fraud back in 2004 yet the last two administrations have not indicted a single major player in the industry.
But by all means, ignore them and pay attention to the small fry browsing porn.
Well, porn is the most lucrative business on the internet... So basically, they were trying to figure out something out of it to help the economy.
DEATH TO THE INFIDEL!!!!
Kind of like reading /. at work?
I work for a government agency, and we're allowed to use the internet for non-work purposes. In fact, Slashdot was specifically mentioned as an acceptable site to visit on our government-owned computers. The general guidelines are:
-Don't visit porn sites (an automatic firing offense, unless it was truly inadvertent)
-Don't do anything for personal profit (checking an eBay auction is okay, running an eBay-based business isn't)
-Don't behave unprofessionally
-Don't use excessive bandwidth
-Don't spend too much time online for non-work reasons (i.e. get your work done)
(sometime around 2025)
Attorney: "And to my son Jimmy, I leave my 750GB of porn."
Jimmy: "Only 750GB? My SDU optidrive is 100 times bigger than that!"
Mr. Lippman: It's come to my attention that you and the cleaning woman have engaged in sexual intercourse on the desk in your office. Is that correct?
George Costanza: Who said that?
Mr. Lippman: She did.
George Costanza: [pause] Was that wrong? Should I not have done that? I tell you, I gotta plead ignorence on this thing, because if anyone had said anything to me at all when I first started here that that sort of thing is frowned upon... you know, cause I've worked in a lot of offices, and I tell you, people do that all the time.
Mr. Lippman: You're fired!
George Costanza: Well, you didn't have to say it like that.
I personally warned the rest of the company about the McAfee problem earlier this week because I was goofing off on Slashdot.
Saved countless hours of problems.
Besides, the IT department just wants the good porn to go into the shared collection and for the job to be done. If I am waiting for a long-ass process to happen and would otherwise be left picking my nose or jabbering at someone who is trying to work, a bit of down time with a browser is not a big deal.
No, it isn't. You have no idea what you're talking about. Many large employers allow casual net use, as long as it is incidental, doesn't interfere with your work and doesn't hog the resources. These same employers, of course, also have ethics guidelines prohibiting watching porn, of course. Or using the company computers for political activity or for anything illegal.
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
Interesting that this years-old story rears up now, when the SEC is suing Goldman and the administration is pushing financial industry reform.
Sounds like there certainly was (is?) a porn problem at SEC. Convenient that is was such a non-story, until needed.
Oh for christsake, it's not nonsensical, it's true. People are terrified of 'sex,' and anything sex related. It's the latest hip-craze to hate crimes involving sexuality. I can almost hear the hissing masses reading this article "Sssssssseeex offendderrssssss!" Bad judgement, yes; It's just as bad as playing Farmville or WoW. Not worse though.
"Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad." [Ecclesiastes 7:3]
Look at the man in the cubicle across from you. Now look at the two men to the left of you. Now look at the two men to the right of you.
I'm on a horse.
No in companies, surfing porn can and often gets you fired. In Government doing the same just gets you transferred to the next site/department.
It is just too f'n hard to fire people in government.
See the difference?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Bush was absolutely and without a doubt the worst president this country has ever had. He will be remembered as such forever. Everyone who voted for him should feel mortified by their choices, if they have any decency, patriotism, or respect for the office of president.
If Bush had wanted a functional SEC, he could have created one. He obviously either did not care, or was not competent enough to do it, because Obama sure as hell did.
Important take away from this: the SEC under Bush was incompetent. Obama fixed that. Got it? Is that fucking clear enough for you brain damaged simians? Got that through your thick, slope browed Republican skulls? Good, now please waste your fucking mod points on me, you can't touch my karma, bitches.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Incidentally, it was Slashdot that keyed us into the source of our problems (McAfee) on Wednesday. If that's not justification for my constant screwing around^W^W research on Slashdot every day, I don't know what is.
I'm pretty sure these aren't the kinds of positions that get replaced every election. I'm sure they get to keep their jobs for life, if they were so inclined.
Sad isn't it?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
What a surprisingly reasonable policy.
By giving people a false sense of security, the SEC keeps people from even making the barest attempt at due diligence before handing over their money to the Bernie Madoffs of the world. If you're going to delegate this responsibility to anyone, it should be to a private agency that has something to lose if they fuck up, not to a bureaucracy which will in all likelihood get a budget increase after a major failure.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."