D.C. government works to recover from online porn debacle

City taking steps to limit Web access after firing nine employees for porn offenses earlier this week

After firing nine government employees for visiting "an egregious amount" of pornographic Web sites, the District of Columbia announced this week that it has implemented a filtering scheme that would screen porn on all government computers.

According to D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty, the city has begun putting technology in place that will block sexual content and notify users of the government's Web use and access policies. The changes to the system were made after an earlier investigation revealed that employees in 18 government agencies had violated the city's policy that barred employees from viewing pornography on city computers.

The investigation, which searched for inappropriate content on more than 10,000 city computers, began in mid-December after a city employee had complained to the D.C. Office of Personnel Management about other employees abusing government resources. According to the Washington Post , all nine of the fired employees clicked on porn sites more than 19,000 times over the span of the year, with three employees clicking on porn sites more than 39,000 times. During his news conference about the incident, Fenty said the employees' behavior was "not just egregious" but "reprehensible."

Andrew Lochart, the vice president for marketing and product management for security software vendor St. Bernard, says that D.C.'s porn problem is a common one for many city governments, and he estimates that about 30% to 40% of all municipalities and businesses nationwide have no clearly defined acceptable-use policies for their employees. In order to prevent porn-related catastrophes, he says, companies and governments should first come up with a clear set of guidelines for Web usage and then purchase the security software needed to enforce them.

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After firing nine government employees for visiting "an egregious amount" of pornographic Web sites, the District of Columbia announced this week that it has implemented a filtering scheme that would screen porn on all government computers.

According to D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty, the city has begun putting technology in place that will block sexual content and notify users of the government's Web use and access policies. The changes to the system were made after an earlier investigation revealed that employees in 18 government agencies had violated the city's policy that barred employees from viewing pornography on city computers.

The investigation, which searched for inappropriate content on more than 10,000 city computers, began in mid-December after a city employee had complained to the D.C. Office of Personnel Management about other employees abusing government resources. According to the Washington Post, all nine of the fired employees clicked on porn sites more than 19,000 times over the span of the year, with three employees clicking on porn sites more than 39,000 times. During his news conference about the incident, Fenty said the employees' behavior was "not just egregious" but "reprehensible."

Andrew Lochart, the vice president for marketing and product management for security software vendor St. Bernard, says that D.C.'s porn problem is a common one for many city governments, and he estimates that about 30% to 40% of all municipalities and businesses nationwide have no clearly defined acceptable-use policies for their employees. In order to prevent porn-related catastrophes, he says, companies and governments should first come up with a clear set of guidelines for Web usage and then purchase the security software needed to enforce them.

Of course, Lochart notes, it's crucial to have a content filter that won't be overly broad and block out useful content as well as unwanted content.

"When you're searching for content filtering software, the main thing is to get a product that has as many categories as possible," he says. "As vendors, we compile a database of tens of millions of Web pages, and have categorized them as, say, social networking sites, porn sites, gambling sites. This lets customer have fine-grained approach to what we're going to allow and not allow."

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