US officials watched Net porn during recession

WASHINGTON, USA: US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) officials meant to mend the economy during the recession spent much of their working hours surfing the internet for pornography instead.

An investigation by the SEC at the request of Senator Chuck Grassley found 31 employees of SEC spent hours on the commission's official computers looking at pornography sites over the past two and a half years, ABC News reported Friday.

Seventeen of the offenders were senior officers with salaries ranging from $100,000 to $222,000 per year.

One senior attorney at the headquarters in Washington spent up to eight hours a day accessing internet porn. When he filled all the space on his government computer with pornographic images, he downloaded more to CDs and DVDs that accumulated in boxes in his offices, the report said.

While an accountant attempted to access porn websites 1,800 times in a two-week period and had 600 pornographic images on her computer hard drive, another accountant attempted to access porn sites 16,000 times in a single month.

The report also said an employee tried hundreds of times to access pornographic sites and was denied access. Then he used a flash drive to bypass the filter to visit a "significant number" of such sites.

The employee also said he deliberately disabled a filter in Google to access inappropriate sites.

Another regional supervisor in Los Angeles accessed pornographic and sexually explicit content up to twice a day from his official computer during work hours, the report said.