33 of the 4,000 people who worked for the Securities and Exchange Commission in the last five years -- 31 of them within the past three years -- were busted viewing pornography on the job, including 17 senior employees earning between $99,000 and $222,000 a year, according to a report from the SEC's Office of the Inspector General.
The SEC has further increased penalties for misusing government resources in recent months, meaning that some of the employees have been suspended or fired, according to CNN. In addition, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Schapiro said she “will not tolerate” employees viewing pornography in the workplace, according to an article in Bloomberg BusinessWeek.
Some of the most egregious examples included an accountant in a regional office who was denied access by the government firewall 16,000 times when he tried to access Web pages containing pornography, a regional office staff accountant who not only tried to access pornographic websites nearly 1,800 times during a two-week period, but also had about 600 pornographic images saved on her laptop hard drive, and an attorney in Washington, D.C. who spent up to eight hours a day watching pornography, according to the OIG's report.
"In fact, this attorney downloaded so much pornography to his government computer that he exhausted the available space on the computer hard drive and downloaded pornography to CDs or DVDs that he accumulated in boxes in his office," the inspector general's report said.
An article in the Washington Post cited several other examples of federal employees using their work computers to view or download porn. ProPublica also pointed to a 2008 blog posting describing a similar SEC report in that year.
While federal computers, including the SEC's, typically have Internet filters, in some cases, employees used a flash drive to bypass them, the report said. Similarly, the 2008 report also described several cases where employees bypassed filters, such as through using Google.