Slashdot Mirror
US Missile Defense Staff Told To Stop Watching Porn
An anonymous reader writes "John James Jr., director of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency, who is responsible for the nation's missile defense system, recently sent out a one-page memo warning employees and contractors to stop using agency computers to visit pornographic Web sites. That's right; apparently they were watching the wrong type of bombshells."
Not that this is really news worthy but who cares if they are watching porn? This is a legitimate job that has to be staffed 24/7 and probably requires about 20min worth of total combined labor in a typical year. Being the military that is increased to maybe a few days labor worth of redundant checklists over the course of the year.
Why is this considered news?
It's news to me that what are supposed to be professional soldiers/airmen have to be reminded not to engage in non-work related activity while on duty. (Whatever happened to "You can review the field manual during periods of inactivity. No, you absolutely cannot read the newspaper while on duty.")
It's news to me that people are using what are probably supposed to be secure or semi-secure systems to browse non-work-related sites on the public Internet.
It's news to me that the government's response to the above was to send a memo instead of busting them all back to private and assigning them to toilet duty.
Many years ago, when I was working on a large govt contract, one of the GS civilian managers got caught messing around with his secretary in one of the stairwells (security cameras? where?) and was not fired. He was instead 'promoted' into some position that, best I could tell, involved organizing social events and morale/team building activities. Since he couldn't be fired, he was placed in a slacker, low-stress position where he wouldn't be entrusted with anything that was actually important.