SEC Employees Viewed Porn While Rome (and Wall Street) Burned
Well, we knew that SEC employees weren’t policing the Lehman Brothers or sharing information on its collapse with the Fed and they weren’t getting Goldman to
Now we’ve obtained reports of 16 investigations into porn-surfing by SEC employees and contractors (one of them is a woman!), including one man who said his daily porn viewing at work was limited to “no longer than an hour and a half a day.”
The work computer of one regional supervisor for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission showed more than 1,800 attempts to look up pornography in a 17-day span: “It was kind of distraction per se,” he later told investigators.
Outside of the efforts to look at those 1,800 pages, the man still managed to “look at” actual pornography at least twice a day, he reportedly told investigators. Other employees reported using their computers to look at pornography multiple hours a day, or even a few times a week.
Sites accessed by SEC employeesincluded everything from AdultFriendFinder.com (a dating site dedicated exclusively to sexual encounters) to Megarotic and YouPorn (well-known video porn sites often dedicated to amateur exhibitionists) to fetish sites catering to a variety of distinct interests. One staffer used loopholes in the content filter to download child porn, and his case was referred to the FBI for investigation. Otherwise, employees were reprimanded and sent back to their desks and their computers.