Legal News

SEC?s Porn-Gate Now Spans the Country

By Nathan Koppel

Last year, the SEC inspector general revealed that more than two dozen agency employees and contractors had been investigated for viewing pornography on their government computers.

The work computer of one SEC supervisor showed more than 1,800 attempts to look up pornography in a 17-day span: "It was kind of a distraction per se," the supervisor later told investigators, as we noted in this post.

Thanks to Denver lawyer Kevin Evans, more news has surfaced about the breadth of porn viewing by SEC employees and contractors. Evans sued the SEC last year to get more information on the agency’s porn probe, the Washington Post reports.

In response to the suit, the SEC has disclosed that the employees and contractors reprimanded for online randiness worked at SEC offices in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Fort Worth, Los Angeles and at agency headquarters in D.C.

Evans told WaPo that he pursued information about the pornography matter because it “galled me to no end” that SEC employees were spending “hours and hours over weeks and weeks” viewing porn while collecting government pay.

His porn suit ended in December, though, when a judge declined to release the names of the employees and contractors involved, the Post reports.

In an earlier statement, an SEC spokesman said: "Any level of misuse of government resources for inappropriate purposes is a matter of serious concern, which is why the SEC provides regular and comprehensive training on the proper use of the Internet."

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 10, 2011 (boomark / email).