The SEC investigation: staff watched porn as the economy crashed
When it comes to sub-prime, banking deregulation and global financial crisis, I'm firmly in the confused camp. I'm aware that in the US, fingers of blame have often been pointed at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), but my understanding extends little further than that.
However, my attention was drawn (thanks Alex!) to recent reports on the investigation of senior SEC staff members who clocked up hours of work-time porn surfing, even as the massive financial crisis was unfolding.
A senior attorney at the SEC's Washington headquarters spent up to eight hours a day looking at and downloading pornography. When he ran out of hard drive space, he burned the files to CDs or DVDs, which he kept in boxes around his office. He agreed to resign, an earlier watchdog report said.
Darrell Issa, the top Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, says it is “disturbing that high-ranking officials within the SEC were spending more time looking at porn than taking action to help stave off the events that put our nation’s economy on the brink of collapse.”
A mind-boggling story, but worth noting that the number of people identified by the inspector general in its investigation is less than 1% of the SEC's 3,500 employees. Relatively speaking, that's a low proportion. According to a 2006 survey by Websense Inc, around 16% of men with internet access at work admit to viewing porn in the office.
For me, the SEC revelations highlight the sheer intensity of some people's compulsive appetite for porn, to the point of jeopardising their high-flying careers.
One case involved an SEC regional office staff accountant caught trying to access porn sites 1,800 times over a two-week period. That person apparently stored over 600 images on her laptop hard drive.
Another employee used SEC computers to upload explicit videos of his own to various porn sites that he had joined, while still another tried accessing porn sites 16,000 times in a month, the report said.
Among those snared in the investigations were two senior enforcement attorneys, one of whom had 775 pornographic images on his SEC-assigned computer.
Porn Game Over is Jason's self-help plan for quitting the habit. Click here for a fresh approach to internet pornography addiction...
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4 comments
YES! this article raises the
YES! this article raises the same old chestnut that keeps come back time & time again. i.e. using or viewing porn whilst at work. This shows that nobody at the SEC was monitoring staff online activities nor does it look like porn use in work time was even an issue at management level.
That's because I suspect "the most senior people" at the top of the SEC were the worst porn offenders in terms of using SEC machines & office work time. What utterly amazes me is how watching online porn was way more important than the looming economic & financial crisis. Yet another example of financiers fiddling whilst Rome burned around them !!
What utterly "boggles my
What utterly "boggles my mind" is ow the hell did they get away with such behavior for so long? Someone must have been seriously asleep at the wheel so to speak!! no wonder there was a financial crash in the USA as a consequence. Too busy with their hands on the hard on's than steering the financial markets through the storm. No wonder the ship almost went down, you couldn't make this stuff up.
Here's an odd thought!
Here's an odd thought! Perhaps the fact that watching porn was a plague proportions at the SEC at all levels within the organization. Shows that using porn was a reaction to the looming crisis in other words the porn usage was a symptom of the extreme level of denial that was collectively going on. The more the stress levels went up in the face of a potential disaster the more that porn was used (turned too), the porn was like a dummy used to quieten the distress. The bosses preferred to have a wank or hold their dicks in the hands rather than face up to the financial Tsunami that was coming towards them? (does that make sense?). That's an awful lot of VERY expensive wanking the US tax payers forked out for !!.
Well said. This is a classic
Well said. This is a classic case of how intense an appetite for porn can be. Knowing the addictive draw of porn, this probably shouldn’t surprise us. According to Computerworld, half of Fortune 500 companies have dealt with at least one incident of computer porn use over a 12 month period. It is also estimated that 20% of visitors to porn websites are accessing from work. Amazing.
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