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Thanks to a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request by The Washington Times, taxpayers have learned that some of their funding has gone into a form of hardcore anatomical research. Described as resource abuse, watching porn has become such an issue for the NSF (National Science Foundation), that attention given to investigating grant fraud by the Inspector General was diverted in order to address it.
Working for the government has some interesting perks.
Thomas Cross, the Inspector General for the NSF, outlined the “Abuse of NSF IT Resources” in a recently published semiannual report.
One instance in the NSF Inspector General’s report details the account of a senior official who, over the course of two years, used 20-percent of his workday to visit pornographic sites and take part in explicit online chats. Over 24 months, it was determined that the employee charged more than $40,300 USD to his personal credit card to cover his porn habit. Based on his salary, the senior official’s porn surfing cost tax payers more than $58,000 USD.
While not mentioned in the Inspector General’s report, The Washington Times accounting said that the official claimed that he was helping those “young women” as they lived in poor countries and needed the money to help their parents. The official left the NSF over the incident.
Another example of porn-on-the-job mentioned in the report centers on a woman who said she mistakenly downloaded nude images of herself, and stored them on her hard drive along with other images. She was reprimanded. Another employee, suspended for ten days over his porn use, had a network drive that contained, “…numerous sexually explicit media files, two copies of peer-to-peer file sharing software, and website favorites (bookmarks) with sexually descriptive titles.”
So what is being done about this? Not much.
"In response, management has now installed filtering software but informs OIG it will not monitor either unsuccessful attempts by users to access inappropriate sites or the existence of inappropriate content on NSF servers. It is considering ways to improve its IT Security Training, but declines to limit the electronic storage space available for employee personal use because such storage is inexpensive (even though employees do not need such quantities for business use)," the report said.
Why install the filtering software if you are not going to monitor who is abusing the office Internet? Moreover, if you know your staff is abusing network storage, by keeping porn on the network, why wouldn’t you monitor that or restrict it? We may never know.
Cross told The Washing Times that it appears the issue has been fixed, but that still leaves the issue in the open. If no one is watching, how will anyone know if the Internet filters are working? For the most part, while some offenders were fired, and some suspended, others were given training and a slap on the wrist.
The NSF Inspector General’s report is here.
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