9 D.C. Workers Fired For Looking at Porn

[derekkj 0]

COMPUTER CRACKDOWN

9 D.C. Workers Fired For Looking at Porn

Investigators Seize Office Computers

By David Nakamura

Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, January 24, 2008; Page B01

Nine D.C. government employees are being fired for viewing pornography on their work computers, including three who looked at inappropriate sexual images an average of about 200 times per work day in 2007, city officials said yesterday.

Each of the nine employees clicked on porn sites more than 19,000 times last year, according to the results of an internal investigation of 10,000 government computers, officials said. Three visited such sites more than 39,000 times apiece last year, the investigation found.

Thirty-two other employees who visited porn sites more than 2,000 times will receive letters of reprimand or suspensions.

"This is not just egregious behavior, it's reprehensible," Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) said at a news conference at which he and several deputies announced the firings.

Administration officials said the employees, who were not identified because of privacy laws, were notified yesterday of their terminations or suspensions, but many are unionized and have the right to appeal.

The investigation was launched late last month after D.C. Chief Technology Officer Vivek Kundra received a tip from an employee in the Office of Property Management, officials said. Kundra then conducted a review of the 10,000 city computers -- about one-third of the government's total -- that contained porn-monitoring software called WebSense, which had been installed several years ago.

The investigation uncovered no evidence of employees looking at child porn, officials said. The nine employees being fired work for four agencies: property management, contracting and procurement, child and family services, and the attorney general's office. Fourteen other agencies had employees who had viewed porn more than 10 times per day, officials said.

Since 1999, the city has had a policy that bars employees from looking at porn, but there was little ability to enforce it, Kundra said. This month, Kundra's office installed a tougher version of WebSense software that blocks porn on all 30,000 city computers and will redirect employees from inappropriate sites. That software cost $142,000, Kundra said.

City Administrator Dan Tangherlini said WebSense is a standard government tool used by many cities to monitor and prevent employee access to pornography. Officials said they did not seek to determine whether employees were using government computers to engage in any other inappropriate Internet activity, such as online gambling, primarily because they wanted to contain the investigation to make it manageable.

Kundra said investigators confiscated the computers of the nine employees who will be fired and conducted a digital forensic analysis to ensure that those employees were the ones who had accessed the porn.

By tracking each employee's Internet protocol address, officials were able to determine with "100 percent certainty" that those employees were the ones involved, he said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...d=moreheadlines

That's even more times than I get on VJ!

Imagine what they will find when they look at the rest of the computers!

Edited January 24, 2008 by derekkj

[Nessa 23]

those pervs

*runs to delete the cache and all the porn pics*

[almaty 19]

those chopf##ks...runs to get screw driver to remove hard drive out of work computer

[Amby 490]

I can look at porn all I want...well some of it since I use the library's wifi it blocks most porn related things

[Ban Hammer 12,829]

those pervs

*runs to delete the cache and all the porn pics*

those sites are blocked at work.

[almaty 19]

lol..a question.. several clients of mine, were referred for this..that is, over porn..as they found it on the hard drive??/ according to most of them, they deleted it after a short time from their work computer..but later discovered.is this true?

[Ban Hammer 12,829]

lol..a question.. several clients of mine, were referred for this..that is, over porn..as they found it on the hard drive??/ according to most of them, they deleted it after a short time from their work computer..but later discovered.is this true?

"deleting" a file does not mean it's gone, it has the first letter of the name wiped out with a *

it can be recovered quite easily as long as it's not been written over.

now if someone was to muddy the waters for them, say deleting the file and recreating one with the same name and deleting that new one again, that would make things a bit more difficult

[Jason-Sasha 1]

Must be what is keeping USCIS adjudicators from doing their jobs efficiently.

[almaty 19]

lol..a question.. several clients of mine, were referred for this..that is, over porn..as they found it on the hard drive??/ according to most of them, they deleted it after a short time from their work computer..but later discovered.is this true?

"deleting" a file does not mean it's gone, it has the first letter of the name wiped out with a *

it can be recovered quite easily as long as it's not been written over.

now if someone was to muddy the waters for them, say deleting the file and recreating one with the same name and deleting that new one again, that would make things a bit more difficult

sounds like good advise..i will lecture them and when they are truly reformed..help them out of this mess

[Eric_and_Corinna 0]

Must be what is keeping USCIS adjudicators from doing their jobs efficiently.

If I would have known that was all it took to get their attention I would have included some better pics of my wife!! We'd probably be done by now. Or on second thought, maybe they'd just hold on to the case for even longer

[Jasman0717 8]

That was your tax dollars hard a work....no pun intended

[DeadPoolX 9]

lol..a question.. several clients of mine, were referred for this..that is, over porn..as they found it on the hard drive??/ according to most of them, they deleted it after a short time from their work computer..but later discovered.is this true?

"deleting" a file does not mean it's gone, it has the first letter of the name wiped out with a *

it can be recovered quite easily as long as it's not been written over.

now if someone was to muddy the waters for them, say deleting the file and recreating one with the same name and deleting that new one again, that would make things a bit more difficult

Of course... there are programs that will efficiently wipe data from the hard drive, thereby making it impossible to recover. But most people don't have these on their system and wouldn't know where to go about looking for them, either. Besides, you'd have to know when to use one of these programs ahead of time and in general, the authorities won't warn you before they seize you and your equipment.

A Solution on How to View Porn While at The Office

One thing that would be smart for dedicated porn surfers to do while at work (and please do note I am not advocating this behavior) would be to install a version of Firefox on a sufficiently large USB Flash Drive (I've seen very affordable 4gb and 8gb models now; there are larger ones, of course), plug the drive into a high-speed USB 2.0 port and run the browser from the Flash Drive. The browser will still record all the data, but it will record it to the Flash Drive instead of your work computer's hard drive. In addition, this would enable you to download pictures and video as well, since it go directly to the Flash Drive and not your work computer's hard drive.

Doing this would also make it a lot easier to take home anything you collect, since you can't very well e-mail those home to yourself using your work e-mail. You could still use personal e-mail while on your Flash Drive, but then you'd have to re-download it, so why bother? You can just carry it home.

This should also bypass any settings you'd normally have imposed on you at work, since you'd be using your own version of Firefox instead of whatever browser your work has chosen for you. Your main limitations would be space (Flash Drives don't hold as much data as modern hard drives do), write speed (Flash Drives are generally slower than modern hard drives as well) and above all, not getting caught. The latter, of course, would be an issue no matter what.

[Ban Hammer 12,829]

lol..a question.. several clients of mine, were referred for this..that is, over porn..as they found it on the hard drive??/ according to most of them, they deleted it after a short time from their work computer..but later discovered.is this true?

"deleting" a file does not mean it's gone, it has the first letter of the name wiped out with a *

it can be recovered quite easily as long as it's not been written over.

now if someone was to muddy the waters for them, say deleting the file and recreating one with the same name and deleting that new one again, that would make things a bit more difficult

Of course... there are programs that will efficiently wipe data from the hard drive, thereby making it impossible to recover. But most people don't have these on their system and wouldn't know where to go about looking for them, either. Besides, you'd have to know when to use one of these programs ahead of time and in general, the authorities won't warn you before they seize you and your equipment.

A Solution on How to View Porn While at The Office

One thing that would be smart for dedicated porn surfers to do while at work (and please do note I am not advocating this behavior) would be to install a version of Firefox on a sufficiently large USB Flash Drive (I've seen very affordable 4gb and 8gb models now; there are larger ones, of course), plug the drive into a high-speed USB 2.0 port and run the browser from the Flash Drive. The browser will still record all the data, but it will record it to the Flash Drive instead of your work computer's hard drive. In addition, this would enable you to download pictures and video as well, since it go directly to the Flash Drive and not your work computer's hard drive.

Doing this would also make it a lot easier to take home anything you collect, since you can't very well e-mail those home to yourself using your work e-mail. You could still use personal e-mail while on your Flash Drive, but then you'd have to re-download it, so why bother? You can just carry it home.

This should also bypass any settings you'd normally have imposed on you at work, since you'd be using your own version of Firefox instead of whatever browser your work has chosen for you. Your main limitations would be space (Flash Drives don't hold as much data as modern hard drives do), write speed (Flash Drives are generally slower than modern hard drives as well) and above all, not getting caught. The latter, of course, would be an issue no matter what.

and even that above won't help anyone who has net nazis at work.....

[DeadPoolX 9]

lol..a question.. several clients of mine, were referred for this..that is, over porn..as they found it on the hard drive??/ according to most of them, they deleted it after a short time from their work computer..but later discovered.is this true?

"deleting" a file does not mean it's gone, it has the first letter of the name wiped out with a *

it can be recovered quite easily as long as it's not been written over.

now if someone was to muddy the waters for them, say deleting the file and recreating one with the same name and deleting that new one again, that would make things a bit more difficult

Of course... there are programs that will efficiently wipe data from the hard drive, thereby making it impossible to recover. But most people don't have these on their system and wouldn't know where to go about looking for them, either. Besides, you'd have to know when to use one of these programs ahead of time and in general, the authorities won't warn you before they seize you and your equipment.

A Solution on How to View Porn While at The Office

One thing that would be smart for dedicated porn surfers to do while at work (and please do note I am not advocating this behavior) would be to install a version of Firefox on a sufficiently large USB Flash Drive (I've seen very affordable 4gb and 8gb models now; there are larger ones, of course), plug the drive into a high-speed USB 2.0 port and run the browser from the Flash Drive. The browser will still record all the data, but it will record it to the Flash Drive instead of your work computer's hard drive. In addition, this would enable you to download pictures and video as well, since it go directly to the Flash Drive and not your work computer's hard drive.

Doing this would also make it a lot easier to take home anything you collect, since you can't very well e-mail those home to yourself using your work e-mail. You could still use personal e-mail while on your Flash Drive, but then you'd have to re-download it, so why bother? You can just carry it home.

This should also bypass any settings you'd normally have imposed on you at work, since you'd be using your own version of Firefox instead of whatever browser your work has chosen for you. Your main limitations would be space (Flash Drives don't hold as much data as modern hard drives do), write speed (Flash Drives are generally slower than modern hard drives as well) and above all, not getting caught. The latter, of course, would be an issue no matter what.

and even that above won't help anyone who has net nazis at work.....

That's true; however, not every workplace has a very secure or strong network, so it might work pretty well. Of course, I'd have to wonder what job someone could have that would allow them enough time to surf for porn on any regular basis. Usually the idea of being at work is... to work.

[peejay 327]

I have unrestricted internet at work. The bosses could care less what we look at as long as it doesn't infect the company computer with viruses, malware, and screw up their computer. We are responsible adults at my workplace. I wouldn't go to websites on the work machines that I wouldn't go to on my own personal computer. In fact, I bring my own computer to work and just tap into the network whenever I want to surf the net. Why should they care? It doesn't hurt them at all.