Government employees are just like you and me. Just like you and me, they wake up in the morning, put on some chinos, go to work and sit at a computer all day. Just like you and me, sometimes they get bored, so they surf the web a little bit. And — this is where we stray from the “just like you and me” trope — sometimes they watch hours and hours of hardcore porn at work. That’s right: gigabytes of filth are being downloaded from a government-controlled network onto government-issued computers and consumed during government-billed hours. These are your tax dollars at work, people.It seems like there’s a government-worker-watching-porn-at-work scandal every single year, and 2012 is no exception. However, the stakes are a bit different this year since the government workers who got busted with smut also happen to control our ground- and sea-based missile defense system. Last Friday, the executive director of the Missile Defense Agency sent out a memo to his staff, scolding them for “engaging in inappropriate use of the MDA network.” John James Jr. clarified, “Specifically, there have been instances of employees and contractors accessing websites, or transmitting messages, containing pornographic or sexually explicit images.”“Inappropriate” is certainly one word you could use to describe these Defense Department employees’ procrastination methods. “Dangerous” is another. James explained, “These actions are not only unprofessional, they reflect time taken away from designated duties, are in clear violation of federal and DoD and regulations, consume network resources and can compromise the security of the network though the introduction of malware or malicious code.” Indeed, cyber security experts warn that porn sites are especially susceptible to hackers who want to mine government networks for intelligence or even to launch an attack. So these guys are wasting your tax dollars and compromising national security.Just don’t expect the government to punish anybody over this kind of thing. The MDA memo uses some stern language but doesn’t include anything about disciplinary action. This is not dissimilar to what happened last year at the Securities Exchange Commission, where 28 employees were busted looking at porn and none were fired. The year before a National Parks Service superintendent making $145,000 a year was simply reassigned after he was caught looking at over 3,400 “sexually-explicit” images. These are just the workers that got caught, too. Anonymous did a little bit of investigating themselves and found at least 82 people had signed up for the porn site Digital Playground using a .mil or .gov email addresses. Which is just absurd.Maybe the national security issue in this year’s porn debacle will stir our nation’s leaders into laying down some consequences to smut surfing at work. Of course, maybe they might be too busy trying to figure out what to do with the government workers who are smoking meth or banging hookers on the job.This is all to say that some government workers are just like you and me. Others are just out of control.
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