US Missile Defense Staff Told To Stop Watching Porn 187
An anonymous reader writes "John James Jr., director of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency, who is responsible for the nation's missile defense system, recently sent out a one-page memo warning employees and contractors to stop using agency computers to visit pornographic Web sites. That's right; apparently they were watching the wrong type of bombshells."
Why not? (Score:4, Interesting)
Not that this is really news worthy but who cares if they are watching porn? This is a legitimate job that has to be staffed 24/7 and probably requires about 20min worth of total combined labor in a typical year. Being the military that is increased to maybe a few days labor worth of redundant checklists over the course of the year.
Re:Why? (Score:2, Interesting)
Why is this considered news?
It's news to me that what are supposed to be professional soldiers/airmen have to be reminded not to engage in non-work related activity while on duty. (Whatever happened to "You can review the field manual during periods of inactivity. No, you absolutely cannot read the newspaper while on duty.")
It's news to me that people are using what are probably supposed to be secure or semi-secure systems to browse non-work-related sites on the public Internet.
It's news to me that the government's response to the above was to send a memo instead of busting them all back to private and assigning them to toilet duty.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Why? (Score:2, Interesting)
Fun fact,
Almost every time I view the router logs and find porn sites in them, it happens that someone violated the security policy and brought unsecured media from home and infected their work system, clicked yes for a popup and installed something or somehow infected the computer with malware that the Antivirus didn't pick up. I don't know if it cause and effect where the malware caused the porn lookups or if the malware was the result of the porn lookups, but I know a symptom of the malware was pornographic popups. Often times, the infections like the rogue AV infections where the result of infected otherwise legitimate sites using exploits in MS internet explorer or Flash to infect the user's system with no interaction of their own.
As for being prudish or open-minded, it's really a cover your own ass thing. In the US at least, simply watching porn in front of other staff can be grounds for a sexual discrimination and hostile workplace action. In the 1980's, they even tried to keep Clarence Thomas from being appointed to the supreme court over an accusation by Anita Hill that he had a porn video tape in his hands and when she inquired about it, he ask her if she wanted to watch it too. This was being claimed as sexual harassment at a time when sexual harassment was considered more of the type with the boss requiring women to slep with then for a promotion of salary increase.
This might be mainly a US centric concern too. And the amount of porn sites being visited might be a sign of infected computers more then bored employees acting inappropriately.
Re:Why? (Score:2, Interesting)
I think the most disparaging problem is how the west has treated Russia. Bush basically said, stop kicking and screaming, you not going to harm us with the missile defense shield. We ignored their concerns on a lot of other things and demanded they support our positions on others. We even bribed them to follow our stances. We were at odds with them on Egypt, Lybia, and I think Russia pretty much put their foot down with Syria- and China seems to support them.
Putin is the wild card who is trying to reimplement some of the old soviet era internal policies and might just conflate the west helping the rebels in Syria against their wishes with a "terrorist attack" and use it to rally his people to a war they would willingly participate in. He already claimed foreign influences (specifically the US) staged a protest and attempted to interfere with their own elections.
Their objection to interference with Syria is that it is a civil war and foreigners shouldn't be picking the winners of an internal struggle. Especially when Syria was a founding member of the UN and has spent effort and resources in the past to maintain the UN's objectives just to be overthrown by that same group. I understand the different opinions about Syria's behavior but it does seem that outsiders are attempting to topple several middle eastern countries and implement governments more favorable to them. This is one of the same concepts that caused Russia to Rally behind Putin in the last elections with a 64% victory. His campaign theme was mostly "enemies here and abroad are trying to destroy Russia" and his victory speech specifically said âoeWe have shown that nobody can impose anything on us,â
I sort of think this is a thing Putin might welcome. He sees a natural order of things that is out of balance to him.