SEC and Pornography: Workers Spent Hours on Porn Sites Instead of Stopping Fraud

[malaise]

http://abcnews.go.com/WN/sec-pornography-employees-spent-hours-surfing-porn-sites/story?id=10451508
<snip>
The Securities and Exchange Commission is supposed to be the sheriff of the financial industry, looking for financial crimes like Bernard Madoff's Ponzi scheme. But the new report, obtained by ABC News, says senior employees of the SEC spent hours on the commission's computers looking at sites like naughty.com, skankwire, youporn, and others.

The investigation, which was conducted by the SEC's internal watchdog at the request of Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, found 31 serious offenders over the past two and a half years. Seventeen of the offenders were senior SEC officers with salaries ranging from $100,000 to $222,000 per year.

Eight Hours a Day Spent on Porn Sites

One senior attorney at SEC headquarters in Washington spent up to eight hours a day accessing Internet porn. When he filled all the space on his government computer with pornographic images, he downloaded more to CDs and DVDs that accumulated in boxes in his offices.

An SEC accountant attempted to access porn websites 1,800 times in a two-week period and had 600 pornographic images on her computer hard drive.

Another SEC accountant attempted to access porn sites 16,000 times in a single month.
-------------------
WTF????????

[BlooInBloo]

1. (facepalm)

[SidDithers]

40. Exactly...

apparently, even idiots can make $100k+

Sid

[csziggy]

2. "16,000 times in a single month" - that is more than once a minute! n/t

[malaise]

9. Unfuggingbelievable

He clearly did nothing else.

[izquierdista]

25. And when it is unbelievable

it's time to find out what was REALLY going on.

[branders seine]

3. this story is worthless without pictures.

[AnArmyVeteran]

18. Right, I don't believe anything unless I can see proof...

BTW, was the SEC investigating women pretending to have real breasts when they were silicone? And where can I apply for that job.

[DJ13]

4. So when they claimed to have a handle on things they werent lying?

[hughee99]

5. Finally the SEC succeeded in finding someone screwing someone else...

it happens a lot but they never seem to catch anyone.

[PCIntern]

6. Thanks for the leads...

:evilgrin:

[Rex]

7. Hey, anyone needing to hire at the SEC for a really important position!?

Qualifications? Well, I only surf for porn 7 hours a day! I mean, come on! I could spend that one hour catching 'bad guys'!

Think about it.

[Dappleganger]

8. "Her"????

Well, doesn't that blow up a few gross generalizations!

Don't these people have IT folks to lock out unwanted sites?

[PCIntern]

10. Yeah, I understand that Lower Merion Schools just let a couple IT folks go...

[Dappleganger]

12. Let's hope that's not all they get off with...

they should be brought up on criminal charges, don't you think?

[anigbrowl]

11. Hmmm

The 16,000 case works out to about 500/day over a month, which suggests malware or something...I find it hard to imagine anyone could be that consistent for so long. though you never know.

I hate it when these news stories don't provide any link to the report(s). They're public, after all. Anyway, some info (the scheduled semiannual reports) is available at http://www.sec-oig.gov/Semiannual/SemiannualReports.html The top one contains some details about this, starting around page 92.

[malaise]

13. Thanks for the link

:hi:

[unblock]

14. i would not REMOTELY put it past right-wing bigwigs to plant this crap on regulators' computers

while the obvious conclusion is certainly possible, even likely, it's also quite possible that companies who are at odds with the sec might plant a porn-downloading virus onto sec computers so as to gain leverage. this is not a very challenging thing to accomplish, especially if you're willing to funnel money to the right (or wrong) kind of people.

companies and governments who don't want this sort of thing to happen should block it at the source. if there's no legitimate purpose to accessing a porn site, then the it infrastructure should block those domains.

now, i know, somone's going to claim they were investigating the porn sites and accumulating evidence....

[malaise]

17. Wasn't there a similar story about oil regulators in

Colorado before the 2008 elections?
May have been there for deliberate diversion from their real jobs.

add

[izquierdista]

24. Wait a minute....

Why won't your knees jerk like the headline wants them to??

[chill_wind]

27. Dowloading to boxloads of CDs and DVDs sounds pretty purposeful

and willfully involved, at least in the case of one of the officials.

[unblock]

28. if he was actually the one doing it.

as opposed to someone else doing it and planting it.
or maybe they found the planter before he could do the planting.

or, as i noted, sometimes the obvious conclusion is also the correct one.

[anigbrowl]

44. At least one investigation had the guy admitting his porn addiction

I gave a link upthread, plus there's a bunch of articles that'll come up on the first page of a google search for 'SEC porn'.

[chill_wind]

48. As far back as February. CBS had the story out on Feb 2

so while it's taken a while to gain political steam, it wasn't just popped out this week.


February 2, 2010 12:51 PM
SEC Employees Investigated for Porn Surfing at Work

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-6166531-503544.html

and quite a bit since on the google.

[anigbrowl]

50. Yeah, that's often the way

it was sort of old news back in February (because a lot of these offenses took place under the previous administration, but the recent lawsuit and the passage of the financial reform bill naturally drew attention to it. For that matter most of it was public information anyway.

All government agencies are required to report semi-annually to congress about how their agencies are running and those reports are public. They have to notify congress about major disciplinary matters and so on (everything from porn to illegal collusion with the industry being regulated). You might remember Chuck Grassley also fired off a rocket at the beginning of last year about people at the National Science Foundation wasting taxpayer money looking at porn. This is part of his oversight duty, although I can't help feeling he picks on porn violations because they make good headlines.

If you look at the SEC reports, there are also cases of people passing information about investigations back to financial firms, accepting bribes and so on - I think those offenses are much more serious than surfing porn, but because they're often quite technical or hard to explain they don't make it onto the front page of the paper - usually they're buried in the business section. Not that porn is a trivial offense - when we're paying people 6-figure salaries and giving them major responsibilities, I expect them to keep their hands out of their pants/panties.

I think a lot of people don't really appreciate how slow the established media works, and how a news story can often be sitting there in plain sight for months before it becomes a major headline. True, sometimes stories are 'censored' or (more accurately) suppressed by editors and publishers who are afraid of pissing off a big corporation or powerful politician. but a lot of the time stories are slow to get processed simply because a media company usually has only a few hundred journalists and research staff at most, compared to a few million politically active people roaming around the internet looking for interesting stuff.

[EFerrari]

32. Set up Bush's regulators? Why? They're weren't doing sh!t anyway.

This reports on a period starting in 2008.

[unblock]

34. heck, it was probably the shrub gang making sure the regulators did nothing

only the top people are political appointments; the rest are civil servants. gotta keep 'em in line, right?

[EFerrari]

35. I love DC. I could spent years there in libraries and museums

and be perfectly happy. But man, I'm so happy I never worked in one of those shark tanks. :scared:

[The Backlash Cometh]

15. Sexual Exposure Commission?

[frylock]

16. that's some pretty weak-ass system administration..

do they even have an IT dept at the SEC?

[unblock]

19. hmm, poorly paid gov't employee in a position to access reams of extremely important data

if i were a nefarious corporate stooge and wanted to plant or bribe someone at the sec, i'd start in the tech department....

[BlooInBloo]

20. "Reams". heh-heh. heh-heh.

[Patsy Stone]

22. I was just going to say that

I work for a much smaller organizations, and there are so many controls on my web access it's laughable.

[chill_wind]

41. Some of them used flash drives to bypass the filters and some

went to blogs they found that weren't blocked, according to various media accounts.

This is a summary that WAPO had that Charles Grassley had requested.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/documents/SECPornSummary.pdf

[frylock]

45. i'm guessing by flash drives they mean ironkey

[KG]

21. i luvs mah internet pr0n, but i never feel compelled to view it at work. ick.

[AnArmyVeteran]

23. While they were looking at fucking, we were getting fucked...

All of the officials at the SEC who were even associated loosely with enforcement of financial laws should all have every dime they own taken away from them and given to people who lost money. After all, they caused millions to lose their life's savings, their jobs, their homes and their lives. Maybe if there was accountability at the SEC a lot of that financial carnage could have been prevented.

I know Bush probably ordered everyone at the SEC to reduce their investigations or defunding their organization ( a typical republican ploy ) so Bush should have every dime taken from him too and give it to all his victims.

[madinmaryland]

26. WTF??? I thought this was a college football thread.

:wtf:

[Recursion]

29. I was a sysadmin for years

While this is an unfortunate news story, let me assure you:

Every single company with an Internet connection has a lot of users looking at porn, all the time. Every. Single. One.

[Xithras]

30. Yep.

Many years ago the CISO of a company I was working for got a hair up his arse to start filtering these sorts of things, but needed to get buy-in from the directors. To do that, he started logging all of the users visiting porn sites, and cross referenced the computers against usernames to identify the people looking at it. His original idea was to use the list as an argument for more restrictive computer use and filtering policies.

His idea came to an abrupt end when he identified the CEO and two VP's among the culprits. He nearly got himself fired for logging network traffic without authorization :D

The really amazing thing about it though, was the sheer amount of porn and illicit browsing that the filtering identified. In the two months that he was logging, nearly 20% of the computers looked at illicit sites at least once, and quite a few looked a LOT more than once. While his list didn't lead to the filtering he wanted, it did cause a few quiet conversations with a handful of employees, followed by a few transfers, lowered cubible walls, and a couple of resignations (not the CEO or VP's, of course). There were guys looking at porn nearly half the day!

[chill_wind]

31. Yikes. Some interesting twists and turns

in that case.

[anigbrowl]

46. Indeed. Depressing, isn't it.

I used to work for a business that provided computer services to a lot of smallish but high-ticket businesses (law offices, hedge funds, etc in the local financial district) and I was regularly solicited to 'check out this porn'. I got a couple of people fired in fact :-)

[chill_wind]

33. Here's a DU thread on this from March

(and incredibly, only one comment- there may have been other threads)

The Washington Independent (good site) actually had the report that was released and the story on it out quite a while back. ABC news took a month to get around to the report.


http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x7997977

[malaise]

36. I never saw that thread

I wondered about the timing but remember the SEC has charged the 'darling' robber baron with fraud so those who have financed their incompetence via the revolving door and other tricks of the trade are now going to expose all their disgusting behavior.

[malaise]

39. Andy Barr from Politico also commented on the

timing of the release given that the report is way old than the fraud charges.

[chill_wind]

49. Turns out CBSnews reported on it Feb 2 of this year

(see post # 48 )

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-6166531-503544.html

and the Washington Times, who had it then.

[DailyGrind51]

37. The SEC of the Bush Administration, which did not believe in regulation.

[chill_wind]

47. *And* the SEC of the more recent 2 years. Here's a timeline

of some of the more Senior Executives' patterns, according to this WAPO report here:

Several of employees held senior positions, earning between $99,300 and $222,418 per year, the inspector general's summary said. Three of the incidents occurred this year, ten in 2009, 16 in 2008, two in 2007 and one each in 2006 and 2005.

So 13 of the 31 probes cited.


http://voices.washingtonpost.com/federal-eye/2010/04/eye_opener_porn_and_federal_wo.html

I KNOW this is, and will be, politicized by the Right, but I'm not going to help with the rationalization or fuzzing of its importance because of that, either. (And I'm not suggesting that you are, either, but I expect to see many DU threads to that effect, and no other, as the tale goes on). I didn't have a real high opinion of them under Bush, either.

[anigbrowl]

51. Yeah. Many lower-level employees from the Bush admin still work there

Only the senior management are appointed by the executive. the lower ranks don't change as quickly...and sad to say, laziness or irresponsibility don't belong to only one political party.

Hell, I shouldn't be posting on DU right now...I'm self-employed, so I won't get in trouble, but I should really be doing something more productive than posting about this!

[pipoman]

38. I just can't imagine wanting to look at porn at work

let alone surfing it all day. WTF is wrong with people? The thought of the guy in the next cubicle sitting over there with wood all day just grosses me out, and I have a pretty high threshold for gross out.

[chill_wind]

42. I despise them.

Getting paid six figures, half of them Senior Executives, to play with themselves, while American families were and are still being put out into their yards (with their possessions,if they're lucky) by sheriffs all over the country and while banksters doubling their own take-home in the last 2 years.

Madoff was handed to them tied up with a bright pretty bow and they still couldn't come up for air and find their own arses with two hands.

And the best part? In all of their criminally chronic ineptitude and dereliction, they and their precious privacy get to be protected!

In response to the open records request by The Washington Times, the inspector general's office provided more than 150 pages of records and transcripts on the investigations, but declined to identify the employees involved. The office noted that disclosure of the employees' names "could conceivably subject them to harassment and annoyance in the conduct of their official duties and private lives."

Oh, they are not the only federal agency with a porn habit, to be sure:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/federal-eye/2010/04/eye_opener_porn_and_federal_wo.html

but I despise them and their record of uselessness more than all.

[DefenseLawyer]

43. I dealt with the SEC on occasion in the Bush years.

"Lazy" is about the nicest thing I can say about those I dealt with.