Economy Tanked While Government Surfed Porn 405
unixan writes "In a report by the SEC Inspector General that smacks of fiddling while Rome burns, 33 recent ethics investigations all showed that the government employees responsible for keeping an eye on the economy were instead obsessed with surfing porn — while the economy was tipping over. One cited example: 'A senior attorney at the SEC's Washington headquarters spent up to eight hours a day looking at and downloading pornography. When he ran out of hard drive space, he burned the files to CDs or DVDs, which he kept in boxes around his office.'"
Look Around You, Look Around You, Look Around You (Score:4, Insightful)
... government employees responsible for keeping an eye on the economy were instead obsessed with surfing porn ...
So when they were studying boobs online they should have been studying the boobs that were busy running/ruining our financial and housing industries? Understandable how those orders could get confused.
About 16 percent of men with Internet access at work admit to looking at online porn while at the office, according to a 2006 survey by Websense Inc.
Look at the man in the cubicle across from you. Now look at the two men to the left of you. Now look at the two men to the right of you. One of them is surfing porn at work.*
* Unless it's you. And if it is you, how stupid are you? Seriously? Seriously you'd jeopardize your job for that?
Re:Look Around You, Look Around You, Look Around Y (Score:5, Insightful)
Any non-work internet activity is risking ones job.
Not news (Score:5, Insightful)
So, had they NOT been surfing for porn... (Score:5, Insightful)
Would the economy be OK now? Just asking.....
Re:Look Around You, Look Around You, Look Around Y (Score:2, Insightful)
This puritan interpretation is just dumb.
Porn did not kill the economy, the SEC has way more than 30 employees. C'mon.... If porn was such a baaaad thing, no company would be doing anything and the economy wouldve.... oh wait!
Yet none were fired (Score:5, Insightful)
As far as anyone can tell, not one of these people were fired for both not doing their job and for using work equipment in a HIGHLY non-work related manner.
Then again, we have the same thing around here. We know for a fact and have documented at least two people repeatedly, for over half an hour each day for months on end, trying to access porn and porn-related sites. Yet, like the SEC, none have been canned.
To use a tired comment, there used to be a time when one could work hard, get recognized and advance ones career through such work. No longer. Apparently failure is the new success.
The story submission is worded (Score:5, Insightful)
like a troll.
A) DO you think people watch the economy by looking out a window? no. It's worded like the think the economy is in a box and people are just watching in case it finds a way out.
B) They have no way of knowing what's going on in every board room in the financial industry
c) IT's a large organization, of course some people where surfing porn. People are people.
D) None of this excuse what they did. I'm only pointing out that just because it's "the government" doesn't mean the people running it aren't people.
Think before you condemn (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Look Around You, Look Around You, Look Around Y (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Look Around You, Look Around You, Look Around Y (Score:5, Insightful)
The SEC's job was to go after fraud and general theft; they didn't do their job. The fact that a lot of them were caught surfing for pron isn't the point; the point is that they were not doing their jobs and the consequences were for the most part, felt by other people.
Re:Can somebody explain to me... (Score:4, Insightful)
I cant believe people fill up their hardrives with the stuff. I mean porn is fine and all, but how much do you need. Are you ever going to go back and look at your archived porn. I mean, I can understand having some archived that particularly turns you on, or downloading some that you might look at later and then delete, but archiving hundreds of gigs of porn?
I just don't get it. Its not like there is going to be a shortage all of a sudden.
Re:Look Around You, Look Around You, Look Around Y (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Look Around You, Look Around You, Look Around Y (Score:3, Insightful)
or the guy had enough bureaucratic weight that it would flatten anyone that spoke up about it...
heck, sometimes i suspect the office rats that do not get replaced during a election cycle either collect stuff they can leak on a "temporary" boss in case he becomes to uppity, or just wait the term out and then go back to business as usual if said boss got voted out of office.
Re:"Porn" isn't the problem, it's just goofing off (Score:2, Insightful)
This sounds very erudite and post-contemporary, but it's also nonsensical cruft.
Playing Tetris is slacking off. Browsing porn at work is a sign of really, really questionable, almost "flaming out" judgment.
Re:Look Around You, Look Around You, Look Around Y (Score:5, Insightful)
I guarantee you that any competant IT department would not only be fully aware of what was going on, but also smart enough not to stir a pot that big.
If I came in tomorrow and the entire sales team was found to be mass downloading pron, what could we do? Get the entire team fired? Who is going to pick up the slack from that? Can't just replace people just like that. We could filter their content, but how long before that becomes a headache when they can't reach legit sites. We can throttle them but then there are complaints that they can't get any work done while they are chewing through bandwidth on a bit-torrent.
IT's job is to make sure that everyone is up and running. Its the managers job to make sure that people are doing their work. When people start treating IT like a police force, then something is seriously wrong, and you need to look at the power structure and layout of your company. We can be eyes and ears, we can inform managers, but its definately NOT our job to go and get people fired.
And what they were going to do instead ? (Score:4, Insightful)
should they have, god forbid, attempted to * gasp * regulate wall street while wall street was doing all those scams ?
all in a country, and a political environment which have been brainwashed to the core by decades of yelps of "deregulation - you'll cost americans jobs !!" ?
and all the while having a right wing, 'hands off business' administration looming over their head ?
how many of you would dare attempt do actually, god forbid, do your job and try to question wall street in such an environment, and lose all future career options, even if not directly your job ? note that you would probably lose your job, had it been under bush administration, flat out.
even the most left wing politicians were not able to dare speak against wall street, and this 'deregulation - hands off' business, until it became as clear as day that wall street actually perpetrated scams. EVEN during the period wall street was dragging all the world down, there were still 'experts', 'pundits' who were coming up in news channels and delivering opinion on how this was not a crisis and no regulation was needed and attacking whomever dare talked about any regulation. remember how peter schiff was ridiculed right 2-3 months after crisis, despite all the stuff he has said has come to pass and he was right.
leave it aside, there are STILL some totally out of touch right wingers coming up in senate or house floor, and saying 'deregulation', even after it came out that goldman sachs actually perpetrated not 1, but 5 different kinds of scam in one mortgage backed hedge fund.
so, tell me, what would you do in such an environment, if you were them ?
you would watch porn. or play games. because, noone who put you there, wanted you to do your job.
Distraction (Score:5, Insightful)
Sheila Bair hasn't enforced the (non-discretionary) Prompt Corrective Action [market-ticker.org] law on any of the largest TBTF banks.
Henry Paulson lobbied for the repeal of the last vestiges of Glass-Steagall while he worked for Goldman Sachs and then committed extortion by threatening Congress with martial law [youtube.com] unless they handed over $700 billion to a group of unapprehended felons.
The FBI warned about about an epidemic of mortgage fraud back in 2004 [cnn.com] yet the last two administrations have not indicted a single major player in the industry.
But by all means, ignore them and pay attention to the small fry browsing porn.
Re:Look Around You, Look Around You, Look Around Y (Score:5, Insightful)
I personally warned the rest of the company about the McAfee problem earlier this week because I was goofing off on Slashdot.
Saved countless hours of problems.
Besides, the IT department just wants the good porn to go into the shared collection and for the job to be done. If I am waiting for a long-ass process to happen and would otherwise be left picking my nose or jabbering at someone who is trying to work, a bit of down time with a browser is not a big deal.
It's all about timing (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like there certainly was (is?) a porn problem at SEC. Convenient that is was such a non-story, until needed [propublica.org].
Re:"Porn" isn't the problem, it's just goofing off (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Look Around You, Look Around You, Look Around Y (Score:1, Insightful)
Or addicted to the hormone rush from viewing porn in the same way that people get addicted to the physiological reactions to alcohol. An addiction is a low-level conditioned response that bypasses conscious thought. Tiger Woods and Jesse James addicted to sex because they spent at most few hours a week having sex with someone other than their wife? Probably not. Some guy who is surfing porn 8 hours a day? Yeah, that's getting Pavlovian.
Re:Anti economic reform FUD (Score:2, Insightful)
The guy Bush appointed hired these clowns. They were high level folks. Bush hired cronies, who hired their cronies, and so on, regardless of skill level. "Heckuva job, Brownie!" Bush was a clown in a chimp suit, so were the people he appointed, and the departments they ran were jokes, especially the SEC. If Bush could have just gutted it and shut it down , he would have, so his bestest buddies on Wall Street wouldn't have to worry about those pesky investigations. Instead, he did the next best thing: made sure it was staffed with incompetents.
Just in case it wasn't crystal clear (Score:3, Insightful)
Bush was absolutely and without a doubt the worst president this country has ever had. He will be remembered as such forever. Everyone who voted for him should feel mortified by their choices, if they have any decency, patriotism, or respect for the office of president.
If Bush had wanted a functional SEC, he could have created one. He obviously either did not care, or was not competent enough to do it, because Obama sure as hell did.
Important take away from this: the SEC under Bush was incompetent. Obama fixed that. Got it? Is that fucking clear enough for you brain damaged simians? Got that through your thick, slope browed Republican skulls? Good, now please waste your fucking mod points on me, you can't touch my karma, bitches.
Re:Not news (Score:5, Insightful)
I know! How dare he try to regulate the people who tried to influence him! Doesn't he know a politician's role is to be bought and stay bought?
Re:Think before you condemn (Score:4, Insightful)
To be fair... I am taking a break and posting this while at work, although technically I am salaried, so as long as I put in at least 8-10 hours a day at work and keep delivering the code and properly managing the systems I think I am doing just fine.
However.... Let's give credit where credit is truly due...
One of those guys was surfing porn 8 hours a day, filling up his hard drive, and then burning it and keeping it in fucking boxes of burned CDs. That's fucking dedication. That was not taking a break. Porn was a full time job for that man, and his job performance was fucking excellent.
I am not even upset that a considerable portion of our taxes went to Kleenex and hand lotion. That is at least something I am okay with providing. Better that than military helicopters killing innocent civilians in Iraq.
All that said however, it is just sensationalism from the Republican party to be pushing it this hard and I doubt that man is unique, or representative of all of the SEC, and I am sure ~1% of every organization has a man (or woman possibly - that's hot btw) super dedicated to porn.
Re:Look Around You, Look Around You, Look Around Y (Score:3, Insightful)
Sad isn't it?
Re:Just in case it wasn't crystal clear (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh there's plenty of room for debate on that. People love shouting the "Bush is the worst ever" hyperbole because he's just the worst during their lifetime.
My own vote for worst president ever is Andrew Johnson. Did a complete 180 on Lincoln's policies, vindictively screwing over the South in the process. Took decades for state economies to recover. Guy was pretty much an all-around dick too.
You don't like Bush. Fine. But come on, at least try to be intelligent about it. Lunatic ranting doesn't really do much to actually make a point.
Re:Anti economic reform FUD (Score:3, Insightful)
They covered all their bases by contributing to everyone. But yes, Obama is a corporate centrist and will likely pass a toothless, watered down financial reform bill.
Funny, you say that a president can't do anything about the departments that are under his direct control. Bill Clinton certainly did a good job policing his departments, that's how he managed to build up a surplus, by cutting the fat in the departments.
There have been presidencies where the SEC was a real tiger, going after the crooks on Wall Street. There could be again. Is this one? I doubt it, but I'm still hoping Obama and the Dems might do the right thing and regulate the hell out of these assholes. What I'd really like to see is the top tax rate going back up to what it was in the fifties, nearly 90%.
Fuck those Wall Street assholes. Fuck them right where it hurts: their wallets.
Re:Look Around You, Look Around You, Look Around Y (Score:5, Insightful)
What a surprisingly reasonable policy.
Re:Just in case it wasn't crystal clear (Score:3, Insightful)
I think in the past 18 months, the Bush voters have proven how much respect they have for the "office of the presidency".
Re:Not news (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't blame Bush, I don't blame Obama - neither of them were showing up in these guys' offices with a tube of Intensive Care lotion saying, "Here, let me help you with that so you don't get chafed." The people surfing porn on government time & government computers (both paid for at the expense of taxpayers) are responsible, and they should be turfed out immediately.
There is nothing that makes this okay, regardless of who's in the Oval Office. The only thing that's "not news" about this is that one side or the other is attempting to use it for political gain. That was a shocker I didn't see coming.
Re:Not news (Score:3, Insightful)
"Private-time" sexual behavior is one thing - surfing porn, cheating, "wide stances", and even (arguably) paying for escort services on your own time, and on your own dime, is one thing. Doing it when you're being paid to do a job is unacceptable, no matter who you work for, and who sits in the oval office.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Anti economic reform FUD (Score:3, Insightful)
Liar. Clinton cut fat, he was famous for it. Google 'clinton budget cuts.' Of course, Republicans won't admit he was a better fiscal conservative than any of them ever were.
Re:Just in case it wasn't crystal clear (Score:5, Insightful)
Wrong. Good government helps people. It's why we have government. It protects the weak from the strong. If we have bad government, that is not the fault of government, but of We, The People.
As for your ludicrously misinformed points:
Obama has agreed to pull out by 2011. The military says that his plan to pull 45,000 troops out by August is on track.
As for Bagram, I bet you used to use "When will we close Guantanamo?" until we, uh, closed it. Sure, this is a problem, but Obama's record is good in this regard: he will not allow the US to torture prisoners.
The Fed is NOT still handing out free money to Banks. That was Bush's idea, remember? Obama continued it for a while, but now that his policies have gotten the economy into recovery mode, not only is he not handing out more cash, not only did he make AIG execs give back their bonuses, his SEC is suing the bastards.
Spending isn't skyrocketing. I don't know where you even get that. Remember, this is a depression we are in. As FDR proved, we need to spend to get out of it. But skyrocketing? LOL. That's what Republicans do. Look at the surplus over the years, Dems build up a surplus and cut spending, Republicans borrow and spend more, on more ridiculous things. At least Dems spend the money on useful things.
So, the premise that 'they are all the same' is totally false. I don't like Obama because he is a centrist and not the socialist some people claim he is. I wish! But no, he's another Bill Clinton.
Politicians on both sides may have faults. The Dems aren't perfect. But the Republicans are orders of magnitude more evil, selfish, and dishonest.
Re:Not news (Score:3, Insightful)