GOP Lawmaker Up In Arms Over Porny Scientists

Iowa Senator Charles Grassley is going on a hunt -- a hunt for perversion! -- and he's got the National Science Foundation square in his sights. What's going on at the NSF? Apparently, the employees there are knee-deep in online smut!

Grassley, the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, on Tuesday fired off a letter to the NSF's inspector general requesting all documents related to the "numerous reports" and seven investigations into "Abuse of NSF IT Resources" cited in the foundation's 68-page semiannual report.

Despite the less-than-lurid sound of the probes, the employees in question weren't just logging onto their Facebook accounts or buying birthday gifts on Amazon.com. The report says they were watching, downloading and e-mailing porn, sometimes for significant portions of their workdays, and over periods of months or even years.

We're sure that there's not a single other government agency for which the same cannot be said!

Well, in fairness, the NSF has this one guy whose love for online porn borders on the heroic:

In one particularly egregious case, the report says one NSF "senior official" was discovered to have spent as much as 20 percent of his working hours over a two-year interval "viewing sexually explicit images and engaging in sexually explicit online 'chats' with various women."

Investigators calculated the value of the time lost at more than $58,000 -- for that employee alone.

Eeegh! Indeed, the NSF sounds like a vile place to work. But, in their defense, let's recall that if they'd been given more to do under the Bush administration, they might not have had to turn to pornography to pass the time. As Chris Mooney said on Monday night's Colbert Report, the administration was "undermining scientific knowledge on a lot of different issues that have a lot of policy implications." Who wouldn't turn to onanism? Someone should do a study!

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Comments

[Vivuldi]

Oh please, back in 2001 I was running a site aggregating underground links which was, incidentally, mired with XXX-related topics with over 20k visitors on good days. After several analysis ran on the collected information of the viewers, I came across an interesting phenomenon, although not an epidemic, in which the site was getting a fair amount of hits from DOJ, military, and some national research lab domains and IP's. The DOJ hits were sporadic from all over the justice department so I was confident that it wasn't just one guy snooping around to pin me with some subpoena -- it was from 70+ different workstations across the US DOJ branches. This sort of employee delinquency is nothing new and surely does not deserve a national or congressional investigation to be looked into and frankly, it appears to be stemmed from one man's quest, with forethought, to undermine the entire organization for personal aggrandizement.

[lookingovermyshoulder]

It's a shame that it takes a scandal involving sex to get the attention of Congress and the media. The incident with the NSF employee downloading porn is trivial, especially in terms of dollars wasted, compared with other poor management practices that have plagued the agency for years. The Senator should take a look at employment practices at NSF. I think he'd be appalled by the EEO cases the agency has lost, settled, or mishandled, other cases that have ended up in court, and the way employees are shuffled around the agency, being reassigned and "put out to pasture" with no or little work to do when they've clashed with higher-ups. Changes are sorely needed.

[Wazzat]

We HAVE NOT been told how they got this "data": evidently by spying on NSF employees' emails and
internet searches. Maybe that is what the NSA has been up to: spying on the NSF!!!
I fully expected the "Patriot Act" to be used by the Bushies to try to dig up dirt on their "enemies"; now they they have gotten desperate it is no surprise that this kind of nonsense is coming out. And of course science in general IS on the Republicans' enemies list. No, don't expect that Homeland Security was checking out Sarah Palin's husband's internet use or that of Rush Limbaugh or people working for Scooter Libby.....­. but don't be too surprised if such revelations come out about lefties or scientists. The NSA was recording ALL phone and internet use of all Americans for the past years, so they must have juicy tidbits on millions of people. A naive question: WHICH is the bigger waste of money, time or IT resources? And which is more repugnant?

[MilesTone]

An employee has no expectation of privacy in his/her work computer, thus it's not "spying" on their emails.

[Wazzat]

Actually none of us should have any "expectation" of privacy anymore, isn't that what we just found out about the NSA storing ALL communications?
However I insist that the word "spying" is appropriate; I doubt that this was done with their consent.
Certainly it is stupid of an employee of a business or government agency to imagine that emails, internet searches or what they print , xerox or mail at the office will remain private. And as I said we don't know how he got his data, so we don't know whether this was the result of a massive spying or a small sample.
But the question remains as to whether this spying on people in any form is worth the resources it takes, given the other priorities of the moment-and given the adversarial relationship and paranoia it engenders.
I am always suspicious of these moral crusaders.­..it will be interesting to see if in a few years' time there are revelations about his treatment of interns or pages.

[dgscol]

NSF has more undesireable elements than this one. It is the NATIONAL Science Foundation, but you would be surprised how many people there are Chinese or Russian, many barely able to speak English.

AS goes the ACLU, which is no longer American, so now there is this. How is American ingenuity going to take off? How are we to protect our patented secrets, with these infiltrators inhabiting the space?

Before they spend more money over there, they ought to regard how their money is going to be spent : probably spreading foreign propaganda. How about putting the CIA on the job?

[BBackSoon]

I am good with him wanting to get rid of people that are not putting in a full days work. But I think porn is only the tip of the iceberg.

Hell lets look at congress for people not doing anything.

This is simply misdirection. Small ball when you’re down by 10 is not going to get you a win.

But as it has been said all over the place lately, the Repubs in both houses of congress are ‘Safe’ for at least 2 years. Only those up for re-election in 2010 will start to make reasonable decisions just prior to election season. Before then, it will Obstruct, Misinform and Obstruct some more.

[PeterGSW]

The party of Vitter et al. is playing at moral superiority, while ignoring Katrina Trailers, Torture, politicizing the Justice Dept. They cast a blind eye to the abuse of congressional pages by one of thier own who was involved in the investigation of (you guessed it), child pornography.

The use of porn by persons at the NSF is a bad waste of money, but the entire GOP caucus in the Seante and the one in the House which just failed to produce a single vote in support of fixing the economy is a tragic waste of oxygen.

Let the supervisors at the NSF deal with their subordinates, Grassley. Find something useful to investigate, like high crimes and misdemeanors flagrantly committed over the last four years, by a morally bankrupt administration.

[IowaGirl]

This is Grassley's MO. He drums up publicity for himself by going after the military's $100 screwdrivers while ignoring completely their surreally bloated budgets for unnecessary missile programs, weapons, or unnecessary wars. He is a smallminded person who can only function successfully in the role of gadfly and scold. He loves his reputation as a guard of the public dollar. The only problem is he only understands how to guard the public penny.

What an embarrassm­ent--inves­tigating penny ante stuff like this when the economy is collapsing all around us and we're engaged in two wars.

[HeevenSteven]

Where and what else would a Republican investigate now?

[bluemike]

I was in Washington a number of years ago. At that time, and probably yet today, it was not uncommon to find whole floors of large office complexes evacuated because of going-away parties, birthday parties, retirement parties, etc. It was virtually impossible to fire a government worker and those folks knew it. One fellow in my wife's office who brought a pillow to work every day and slept away the afternoon. Work ethic consisted of coming in late, taking long lunches and leaving work early. My experience was only with NIH, HHS, Amtrak and a Pentagon satellite office, so perhaps the rest of government actually functions. If not, then isn't government employment itself a form of pornography?

[EdA]

I, too, would like to know if this "senior official" was/is a Bush appointee or a career staff member. I'd also like to know what happened to Grassley's efforts to try to get the televangelists to open up their books. For some reason, I haven't heard anything about it in a VERY long time.

[DWP]

These Federal Employees have too much time on their hands. So the next question should be are they really necessary? In this time of layoffs one would think they would keep themselves busy.

[kgb999]

Fiddling while Rome burns.

[Hopalongpoppyseed]

Look over here, not over there! (At the economic crisis).

[RoveRoveRoveYourBoat]

...pssst!.­..hey, goofy grassly...­I like communist porn!

[ropadopa]

Psst, Charlie! economy is in a crisis. Schools and other infrastructure are crumbling before our very eyes. Focus!!

[ecotopian]

He is. Smut is way more important than safe bridges. Really! At least to him.