Porn purveyors may be in the next cubicle

News about Internet-enabled child pornography is rampant today. It seems you can’t watch TV news without another startling arrest story, followed by an interview with an expert about how to keep your children safe while online.

It’s great that parents are learning more about how to protect their young from predators. Today, however, I want to talk about how employers can protect themselves from predators and how they can protect the stupid predators from themselves.

In March, a program executive in NASA’s Washington, D.C., headquarters was accused of using his office computer (as well as his home computer) to send and receive child pornography. You can read the detailed allegations of wrongdoing in the affidavit for a search warrant. According to the document, the alleged perpetrator used a fake name to exchange e-mails containing inappropriate materials. Although he tried to hide his identity, his static IP addresses pointing to his home and office were strong clues for the investigators. When the computers were searched, sure enough, the contraband files were discovered.

To its credit, NASA helped finger the guy when Web content filter logs showed that pornographic Web sites (identified by IP address) were being viewed from the man’s office computer. In addition, NASA’s skin-tone filtering system detected that pornographic materials were being viewed on the employee’s PC.

A similar case involves an assistant principal at a New York high school who recently pleaded guilty to using his workstation at school to download and trade pornography. He also admitted soliciting underage girls for sex. Yet another recent case points to a deputy press secretary from the Department of Homeland Security – you guessed it – downloading porn and soliciting young girls.

These men are sick; there’s no doubt about that. They deserve to be arrested and removed from our society through lengthy jail terms. I’m just grateful we have the technology today to monitor and trace the activities of people like this.

Which brings me to the point I want to make: Technology is a tool that can help protect us all. I am including employers in my definition of “us.”

According to Websense, a vendor of Web security and filtering software, 70% of porn is downloaded between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. What’s more, 37% of at-work Internet users in the United States have visited an X-rated Web site from work; 25% of all search-engine requests are porn related. These statistics seem to show that employees like the fast office connection that allows them to view or download inappropriate materials in less time than it would take at home.

Many employers block this type of material with Web-filtering and content-blocking software, such as that from Websense or ContentWatch. Many others, however, just haven’t seen the need to incur the overhead of Web-filtering software.

For the companies in the latter category, let’s play the what-if game. What if it was your employee who used your company’s resources to download child porn and trade it online? What if CNN was blasting your company name every half hour as the story got told over and over again, and images of your corporate headquarters were shown, surrounded by police cars and FBI agents? What if the child victim’s parents sued your company for permitting the employee to do this while at work? What if fellow employees sued over a hostile work environment?

For most employees, it’s enough to tell them that company policy forbids them from visiting porn Web sites at work. Other employees need to have a message saying, “This content is blocked,” to remind them not to go there. A few need reprimand or dismissal if they persist, especially if the activity is illegal and not just immoral.

Web-filtering and content-blocking software should be a standard part of your network. It’s insurance against situations like the ones above.

Ironically, I had to write this column at home, because the office in which I work blocked some of the search words I used in my research. To my network administrator, I say, “Way to go!”