January 23, 2008
Fenty Fires City Employees for Looking at Internet Porn
And to think we spent time pasting School Chancellor Michelle Rhee's face onto Donald "You're Fired!" Trump's head -- clearly we should have saved that honor for Mayor Adrian Fenty, who this week fired nine city employees after they were caught watching a whole lot of porn on their work computers.
NBC4 reports that each of the fired employees had at least 20,000 hits on pornographic web sites in 2007 alone, with one racking up more than 48,000 hits. Thirty-two other city employees with fewer numbers of internet porn hits are facing lesser disciplinary actions, such as two-week suspensions. The actions came as a result of an internal investigation led by the Office of the Chief Technology Officer. The fired employees came from four different agencies: the Office of Property Management, the Office of Contracting and Procurement, the Office of the Attorney General, and the Child and Family Services Agency. No child pornography was found to be accessed.
The City Paper has more, detailing the city's use of the WebSense filtering program to determine which sites viewed by employees were pornographic or not, and exactly how City Manager Dan Tangherlini decided how much porn was too much porn:
Tangherlini said thresholds were determined as to how many hits warranted termination versus other forms of punishment. About 20,000 hits for the year was considered sufficient grounds for immediate firing, which represents about 100 hits per working day. “That seemed to be a logical cutoff,” he said. Anything over 20 hits a day, he says, represented “something that’s no longer possibly accidental” and required a lesser sanction.Thank goodness all those more reasonable porn connoisseurs working for the District government, who limited themselves to only looking at pornography 15 times a day, are still safe!
In all seriousness though, this is the second round of firings Fenty has announced this month, the first being six employees from the Child and Family Services Agency in the wake of the Banita Jacks case -- a decision which didn't exactly make him popular with our civil service employees. Fenty deserves some credit here for not being afraid to find ways to clean house within a city government that's been known for cronyism and corruption.
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I guess "conducting research" isn't a plausible explanation when you're logging on 20 times a day to porn sites.
Bah. WebSense used to list bOINGbOING as porn. It doesn't now, but I'd like to examine the list of sites. You know, for research and stuff.
mokeyerotica, your comment is waiting....
I'm with you Samer. Could Amazon or ebay or craigslist be on there?
Anyone who logs on to MySpace and clicks mysterious friend requests, or views Digg.com would probably have around 15 "pornographic links" per day. Google image searching "Jessica Alba" could potentially return a "pornographic link." Not to mention hits from popups, ads for porno sites served on non-porno sites, misclicks, etc.
Not saying that the people who got fired weren't looking at porno, I'm sure they probably were. But if this were true: "Thank goodness all those more reasonable porn connoisseurs working for the District government, who limited themselves to only looking at pornography 15 times a day, are still safe!"
Then anyone who uses unfiltered internet would be a "more reasonable porn connoisseur."
Your DC tax dollars: "hard" at work.
If they are using the term "hits" correctly, and not confusing it with "pageviews", then just one accidental click could easily lead to 20 "hits."
Hits counts any file requested from the server. For example, on one DCist page you'll get one pageview but probably well over 30 hits because of all the images, etc, being requested and loading on the page.
So I think someone who got under 20 hits could have visited just one porn site. But maybe I'm wrong here or maybe the article is confusing terms.
Stroke of genius, Fenty.
What if the pornwatchers were getting a lot of work done? After all, we're here wasting time on DCist. The fact that it's porn should really be immaterial (unless it's visible to others and hence creating a "hostile work environment"). If I had a worker who spend 18 hours a day at a desk and got 8 hours of work done, I probably wouldn't mind, even if the 10 other hours off the clock were spent gazing at boobies, as long as I got the solid 8 hours that I was paying for and the recreation did not cost me anything (like dragging down the server or spreading viruses on work computers).
Sorry. I'm on the wrong website. Anyone know where I can find some naked ladies?
voteprime is right. i've used websense before, and one page view usually generates anywhere between 15 and 20 hits, depending on how much content is embedded therein.
OK...assuming one view = 20 hits, that still means the guy with 48,000 hits went to a porno site 2400 times during the year, which is 9.23 views per work day assuming 2,080 hours during a work year....it still seems unlikely to have such a high number and not have been looking at porn....plus, on a government computer, you frankly have to be an idiot to load porn even once, nevertheless 9.23x/day is a bit muc
This all sorta forces the question, WTF isn't this stuff being firewalled at the server in the first place? I can't even get the National Geographic page to show up at work because of all the topless aborigines. How many DC government agency computers have full, unfettered access to shavedpandas.org, giganticasses.net, and stumpf***ers.com?
And I dunno about you, but that pic is really getting me excited. Tiny limbs and wetbrains really put the "lead in my pencil," if you know what I'm saying, and really I hope you don't.
At least Fenty has the good sense to access his subscription to Voluptuous Ebony Teens at home, on his own time. Or at least he uses his personal BlackBerry to check out the mobile version of the site.
Looking at porn while at work sounds so tacky! Why would you want to do that?
Really? You look at porn at work? Are you that much of a fucking idiot??!! If you think that's in any way acceptable in this day and age then you need to go back to working some menial, lower education minimum wage job. Oh, DC employees make more than minimum wage, right?
Monkeyrotica, I've worked under firewall before and it makes it much harder to complete legitimate work tasks and to waste time properly. It seems perfectly reasonable to me to entrust public employees with the keys to the good internet and take same away if they're parked at the strip joint at all hours.
"If you think that's in any way acceptable in this day and age"
You mean there was a time when it was acceptable?
Betty Grable calendars in the gas station garage are one thing, Illinois Enema Bandit videos are quite another.
cant believe no one has commented on the artwork for this one!
I just couldn't control myself. I have to see goatse.cx at least 80 times per day.
Hi, DCist- Here's more to the story, as I blogged today: http://tinyurl.com/38cpha
Thanks. Jon Katz, Underdog Blog