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In the past five years, nearly 100 federal government employees have watched hours of pornography while on the job, according to an NBC Washington investigation.
The outlet obtained records of “egregious on-the-job pornography viewing” from a dozen government agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Postal Service, NASA, U.S. Department of Transportation, and the Social Security Administration, among others. The findings include employees who looked at illicit images and videos, as well as stored tens of thousands of “adult images” on their work computers.
In one case at the Federal Railroad Administration’s D.C. headquarters, NBC reports that an employee searched for porn for 252 hours in one year, which adds up to 10 full work days. And meanwhile at the EPA’s D.C. office, an employee admitted to watching porn for up to six hours a day for several years.
According to memos obtained by NBC, a Department of Commerce employee told investigators, “When I am working hard, I go to these images to take a mental break.”
While spokespeople for the EPA, Department of Commerce, and the Department of Transportation told NBC that the computer misuse could lead to termination, other agencies said penalties “are flexible” and can include written reprimands.
According to the Office of Personnel Management, the federal government employed about 2.79 million civil servants as of December 2011, so the involved employees are about 0.000036 percent of the total workforce.
Watching sexy videos is actually quite common in D.C. Statistics from Pornhub, a video library “of carnal features,” showed that D.C. residents led the nation in the number of pornographic videos watched per capita in 2013.
And during winter storm Jonas last year, Pornhub’s data showed that Washingtonians saw a higher increase in perusing the site than viewers in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia.