Ah, the hard life of the SEC employee must have gotten a bit less stressful recently. Tim Cushing has the, um, sordid details:
An internal investigative report of the SEC’s Trading and Markets division has been recently been reviewed by Reuters. After reading its rundown of the misdeeds and abuses uncovered, I’m left with the urge to laugh maniacally in the manner of someone having just cleared the tipping point and now sliding irretrievably into insanity. The sheer irresponsibility on display here springs from the sort of irredeemable carelessness that comes with spending other people’s money (taxes) and operating without any credible oversight or accountability (a large percentage of government entities).
Bess Levin at Dealbreaker points out that while the SEC’s internal investigation may have turned up several misdeeds, ranging from the merely stupid to the positively horrendous, it is quite a step up from the insatiable pornhounds that used to populate the Commission:
If you had asked us two years or two months or two days ago if we thought that there would be a time in the near future when Securities and Exchange employees would not be regularly reprimanded for watching porn on their work-issued computers for 98 percent of the workday, we would have said absolutely not. No judgment, but in our professional opinion, people do not go from, among other things:
* Receiving “over 16,000 access denials for Internet websites classified by the Commission’s Internet filter as either “Sex” or “Pornography” in a one-month period”
* Accessing “Internet pornography and downloading pornographic images to his SEC computer during work hours so frequently that, on some days, he spent eight hours accessing Internet pornography…downloading so much pornography to his government computer that he exhausted the available space on the computer hard drive and downloaded pornography to CDs or DVDs that he accumulated in boxes in his office.”
…to living a porn-free existence at l’office.
Truly a mind-boggling set of employees. One regional staff accountant ran into the “no-porn” wall 1,800 times in a two week period, yet remained undeterred. Those caught accessing porn with ridiculous frequency cited the “stress” of their jobs as the underlying reason for the nearly uninterrupted pornathons.
The people doing this report have never worked somewhere with a bone head firewall I guess. I run into firewall stopages all the time and many of them are just wrong. Granted, 1800 is a lot 🙂 but there are problems with firewalls.
Comment by Dwayne — November 16, 2012 @ 10:25
^^ This. Back in the ’01-’04 glory days of blogging some of the most innocuous sites, like The National Interest, regularly got tagged as “offensive” by the proxy/firewall manufacturers. NI could be considered offensive only in the sense that it looks at foreign policy issues from a rightward slant, but didn’t employ obvious bomb-chuckers like say Ann Coulter. I remember sending a lot of emails to the security team to look over website classifications, because the manufacturers cast a very wide net.
These days the paternalism is worse, not better.
Comment by Chris Taylor — November 19, 2012 @ 15:01