Grassley Wants NSF Porn Probe Details
Senate Finance Committee ranking member Charles Grassley has asked the National Science Foundation's inspector general to send him details relating to an internal investigation that found "numerous reports" of agency officials spending large amounts of time accessing online pornography and engaging in sexually explicit Web chat. The claims were part of the foundation's 68-page semiannual report to Congress that was dated September 2008 but posted was publicly in December.
The inspector general "recommended that NSF take immediate action to address numerous reports of employees viewing pornography on their government computers. The multiple investigations opened in the past few months, highlighted the need for systemic corrective actions in order to reduce abuse of agency IT resources.," according to the report. There were six cases of "viewing, downloading, saving, and/or sharing pornographic images and videos and one case of extensive participation in pornographic chat Web sites and the concomitant significant waste of official time."
One NSF official spent up to 20 percent of his official work time viewing sexually explicit images and chatting online, the probe showed. Based on the employee's salary the report identified a potential loss of more than $58,000 in compensation for that personal time. The investigation also determined that the employee charged more than $40,300 to his personal credit card over 24 months to participate in the online chats. To limit future abuse, the report recommended changes in NSF's IT training; limitations on employee server storage; routine screening for and deletion of personal music and image files from network drives; and procurement of necessary filtering software.
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