How Many NASA Employees Have Been Busted for Watching Porn at Work?

Over the past two years, six NASA employees have been caught looking at porn while at work, according to documents obtained by Motherboard through a Freedom of Information Act request. One employee admitted to watching porn at work "at least once a week," while another was caught spending the first few hours of his workday Googling "teen boobs" and "bubble butt" on his Blackberry.

NASA is just the latest government agency revealed to suffer from porn-surfing employees. The FCC, the Treasury Department, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Commerce Department, and the General Services Administration have all had employees who were caught viewing porn at work, according to the the Washington Times. Given NASA's size—it employs more than 17,000 federal workers plus thousands more contract workers—it's not all that surprising that half a dozen were caught messing around while on the clock.

Of the six employees who were caught looking at porn on the job, two were fired, one resigned, and three were disciplined by management, though the records don't give any details about what that entails.

In one incident, in June of 2013, the Information Security team at the Langley Research Center in Virginia notified NASA's Inspector General of an alert about possible child porn activity. Upon investigation, the Inspector General discovered an employee had actually been using his personal Blackberry while at work to look for adult porn, with most of his search results being blocked by the LaRC firewall.

Once in June and another time in March, around 9:30 in the morning, the employee tried to access porn at work, unsuccessfully attempting to open as many as 69 images (I know) in a half hour period and searching for terms like "teen selfshot," "teen boobs," "nude self pics," and "bubble butt." The employee was fired, records show.

In another incident, an employee at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida was caught with porn on his computer after somebody filed a complaint. The employee "admitted to having an addiction to pornography and stated he had recently sought help for the addiction," the records state, but it was the second time he'd been caught viewing porn at NASA. He resigned about two weeks later.

In March, Motherboard filed similar FOIA requests with 12 other government agencies that we often cover. Two agencies (the Department of Education and the Office of Government Ethics) said they didn't have any such records. The Department of the Treasury had only one record, but wouldn't release it because it said that would constitute an invasion of privacy. The NOAA would not release its files because it said doing so would interfere with an ongoing criminal investigation, and the rest have yet to respond to the request.

Still, government employees are far from the only ones out there surfing porn sites while punched in at work. A recent survey found that six percent of workers in 11 countries copped to looking at adult content while on the job, and past surveys have found at least 3 percent of Americans say they've looked at porn at work. When did we all start getting so pervy at the office?

"Two things have to be taken into consideration," said Bryant Paul, a telecommunications professor at Indiana University who studies sex in the digital age. "One is the accessibility: it's so easy to stumble onto it. The other thing is our attitude about sexually-explicit content simply has changed. It's become more mainstream."

Paul said that combination can lead even the most well-meaning employee down a rabbit hole really quickly. The accessibility means we're more likely to come across pornographic material in our day-to-day activities online and our changing views on sex mean we might not hesitate as much to check out that content when it does cross our paths. And there's the fact that our coffee breaks are more often Reddit breaks these days.

"People that are nose-to-the-grindstone all of the time probably wouldn't be as likely to have this happen, but who is nose-to-the-grindstone 100 percent of the time?" Paul said. "People used to take a smoke break or go to the water cooler. Now we take these digital breaks and personal dalliances can happen."

Paul said people are also less aware of the idea that they're probably being monitored at work, making them feel even more emboldened to check out some NSFW content. But they are being monitored, especially public employees.

Some of NASA's investigations were actually triggered by information security teams being alerted to network activity that might indicate child porn. Others were the result of personal tip-offs, and the rest were the result of NASA organizations conducting "proactive reviews" of internet activity to look for signs of child porn. Often, the infosec alerts would lead them to employees looking at adult porn, with no evidence of child porn.

But in addition to the six incidents of workers looking at adult porn at work, the records revealed four investigations of employees that involved child pornography. One of these was in investigation of Terry Nolley, a contract web developer at the Goddard Space Flight Center who was sentenced to 97 months in federal prison for running an online child porn bulletin board, though the investigation found he did not access any child porn while at work at NASA.