DC Fires Staffers for Surfing Porn

This was on Drudge by way of WTOP, a local radio station. It seems that DC finally decided to take a look at their logfiles in response to a complaint by employees that co-workers were spanking it to porn during work hours.

You would think the naked lady mouses would be a tip-off that your employees are surfing porn.

This article actually says much more than is written. I will interpret line by line so everyone can understand how lax the DC government was in their duties.

From WTOP here:

Now that 41 District workers have been fired or suspended after visiting pornographic Web sites on government computers the city is cranking up the technology to keep an eye on all government computers.

Sysadmins that have been complaining that their hardware is out of date and their budget was too thin are finally getting a break. Here come new proxy servers and firewalls!

Before its investigation, D.C. could track 10,000 computers. Now the city can monitor 30,000.

Now they have 200% more proxy servers. Most of the city’s infrastructure was running unfiltered onto the web. This is actually very risky, and not because users surf porn, either. There are numerous threats from malicious websites that a good proxy server can filter to protect the user base. Therefore, this means that many computers in the DC government are back-doored with web Trojans. Its not a question of IF, but of How many.

“Content will be filtered. Those sites will be blocked and re-directed to our policy of appropriate use,” says Chief Technology Officer Vivek Kundra.

Standard feature of proxy servers. When you try to access a filtered site such as porn or Youtube, you see a redirect page warning you that you are being watched and to stop being a perv.

The District fired nine employees and suspended 32 employees during its investigation. Of the fired employees’ estimated 200 work days a year, the investigation showed that they visited pornographic Web sites 100 times per day, Mayor Adrian Fenty says.

Seriously, some people need to admit when they have a problem. You know, last month, 4 kids tragically died in DC because the welfare office wasn’t doing its job. I’m not saying they were pervs, but its indicative of how poorly DC runs its services.

The investigation began on Dec. 15 after the Office of Property Management received a complaint from an employee about other employees browsing and downloading pornographic content on government computers.

This means they had no clue prior to this incident that there was a problem with employees surfing porn. It also means that no one is reviewing the log files of the security devices to ensure that the network remains secure. Therefore, it is highly likely that several intrusions have occurred that no one knows about. Which means that important things, like citizen records, social security numbers, financial records, etc may not be safe in DC.