

SEC and Pornography: Workers Spent Hours on Porn Sites Instead of Stopping Fraud - anderzole
http://abcnews.go.com/WN/sec-pornography-employees-spent-hours-surfing-porn-sites/story?id=10451508

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watmough
You know it's funny all this comes out just as the SEC go after Goldman.

Not to condone porn-surfing, or supporting prostitution, but look what
happened to Elliot Spitzer when he went after Wall Street fraud.

Take a step back, and a hard look, before piling on to this stuff. You may be
being manipulated, in the easiest way possible.

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yummyfajitas
The SEC just released two embarrassing reports: the porn report and the
Stanford report. Just before releasing those reports, they made a press
release about a high profile case which appears to be extremely weak.

You are right; the timing of these press releases does suggest we are being
manipulated.

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jbooth
That's just silly. Neither of those reports are threats to the SEC, and the
SEC is not cohesive in the way a corporation is.

Now, you could make a case that the administration gave the SEC a nudge to
file the Goldman case in the week before financial reform goes in front of
Congress, in an election year. _That_ would make a lot of sense.

This is your weekly episode of "examining basic incentives has much more
deductive power than blindly applying ideological predispositions".

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yummyfajitas
The SEC is comprised of people. These people might lose their job or future
promotion opportunities if the SEC is embarrassed under their watch, or if
their poor management becomes highly public. This gives them an incentive to
time press releases to minimize the embarrassment.

By the way, why do you feel the SEC is not cohesive?

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jbooth
To start with, it's governed by a board of political appointees from both
parties who fight with each other regularly and don't have a huge amount of
shared agenda. They're typically going to have much more loyalty to their
party than the SEC. Beyond that, the actual staffers don't "own stock" in the
SEC. These things add up to something much less "cohesive" (for lack of a
better word) than the effect you get when you put a dozen people who have 80%+
of their net worth in the same company in a room together.

Regarding your first point, about people -- yeah. But none of them has a
particularly strong incentive to protect the SEC as opposed to themselves --
the SEC isn't a cohesive group in the sense of ideology or in the sense of a
corporation. And even if they were, the porn story isn't worth launching a
risky investigation over. Like I said, the Obama administration has a definite
interest in pushing cases being filed in this particular 3-week window -- the
SEC as an institution? Meh.

You'd be surprised how many government agencies and employees just plain don't
have the hard-edged desire for nefarious political influence. Office politics,
sure, that's their livelihood. Advocating their superiors to do things "the
right way" as they see it? Sure, who wouldn't. But political influence to the
tune of playing the media? They'd be in a political role if that was really
what drove them.

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yummyfajitas
Suppose the Porn/Stanford stories break. These are both big media-genic
scandals.

Now the public widely perceives the SEC as incompetent/corrupt/perverts.
Congresscritters declare that "something must be done", so they fire a few
people, maybe do a reorg. Oh, and assorted SEC higher ups become known as
"that guy who didn't catch stanford" or "that guy who didn't notice all the
perverts in his office."

This gives all sorts of SEC officials a perfect motivation for drawing
attention elsewhere.

As for launching a "risky" investigation, what's the risk? The case fails, and
the public thinks the noble SEC was beaten by the evil vampire squid? The
worst case I see from this is that congress decides the SEC needs more
money/power. Oh noes!

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dinde
This has nothing to do with the SEC in specific, but with workplace internet
policies in general. It amazes me how many people have no idea that their
internet usage at work is being tracked.

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aidenn0
This just in: at almost every company with an internet connection, workers
spent hours on porn sites instead of doing their job.

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barnaby
Wow! I mean, I work remotely, using my own laptop, and once in a while I'll
look at porn while I should be working, and I always feel guilty about it.
It's certainly not often, but I can't imagine how brazen one has to be to do
this while at an office, on a company computer. Wow!

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gte910h
>Another SEC accountant attempted to access porn sites 16,000 times in a
single month.

Honestly sounds like a computer worm. 16k accesses is 800 per working day, a
little fishy sounding.

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aidenn0
depends; if they are counting each http request, that probably reasonable.

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junklight
I like "The employee also said he deliberately disabled a filter in Google to
access inappropriate sites"

You mean: he turned off the safe search option. Given the rest of the content
it seems odd to spin it so that changing an easy to alter option is made to
sound like "hacking" but perhaps that is all being spun too!

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CWuestefeld
_an employee tried hundreds of times to access pornographic sites and was
denied access. When he used a flash drive, he successfully bypassed the filter
to visit a "significant number" of porn sites._

Huh? How does plugging in a flash drive bypass web filters?

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chaosmachine
Portable Firefox with Tor, or something like that.

<http://www.torproject.org/torbrowser/>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Tor>

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CWuestefeld
Good point, I buy that explanation.

IMHO, anybody who's carrying around TOR and using it to bypass an employer's
filters so he can get to porn has a real problem.

Several years back, me and a coworker looked at the company's DNS servers,
curious what names were cached. We were pretty horrified. I guess this kind of
thing is pretty widespread, more than "outsiders" would expect -- particularly
from a cubicle farm where there's no privacy.

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digitallogic
At a job in college, a desk jockey ordered porn and used his work address on
the purchase. He got caught when the sys admin came across the email w/his
receipt in the spam queue. Though he wasn't fired (he did get chewed out) I
couldn't look him in the eye after I saw the list of movies he purchased (they
were largely she-male dvds).

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AlexBlom
I'm not surprised. A few weeks ago I found that around 60% of my University's
bandwidth as tracked as going through porn sites. What have I been missing by
not going to lectures??

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mkramlich
This seems like just one particular case of:

<something> and Pornography: <people> Spent Hours on Porn Sites Instead of
<something>

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bpourriahi
Don't blame the workers. Blame the boss.

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sriram_sun
That was a trillion dollar Oops!

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elblanco
Well that much is obvious.

