CIVIL servants in a government department have been caught downloading two million pages of porn from the internet.
Among them, more than 18,000 images of child pornography have also been found, resulting in at least one criminal conviction. Two other members of staff are still under police investigation.
Computers at the Department for Work and Pensions were regularly monitored after an employee was caught watching porn at work.
The flood of images that greeted investigators has resulted in 227 civil servants being disciplined in eight months between July last year and March this year.
An internal investigation was set up in July 2003, originally intended to check computers used by the departments 140,000 staff nationwide. Key words were used to flag up suspect sites and within three days around 37,000 records of porn websites via search engines or internet addresses had been found.
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Since last December, a total of 2,319,569 pornographic images and websites have been accessed, some showing children as young as 13. Officials have since re-issued the department’s electronic media policy “in plain English” to all staff warning them that systems are regularly monitored and disciplinary action will be taken.
Logs are now made of each website accessed by each worker authorised to use the internet and a list of the ten worst offenders is passed to human resources every month.
But despite internet blockers which restrict access to sites deemed inappropriate for work, in June and July 2004 alone 592,138 sites were hit.
In all, 16 people have been sacked, three have resigned and another 211 disciplined for misconduct at work.
It is claimed that one member of staff alone had viewed 103,00 images.
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In March this year, John Sweeney, an official at the pensions department, was put on the sex offenders register after being convicted of 32 counts of possessing child porn.
A department spokeswoman said it was committed to disciplining anyone accessing inappropriate material, but in the majority of cases investigations showed that staff had been “accidentally” routed to porn sites by innocent-looking internet links. “Some internet sites are blocked where they are inappropriate but this can also include music or entertainment sites which are not for work use,” she said. “The figures may well be the base data for the number of times the blocking software has been activated.”
There have also been dismissals and disciplinary action at other government departments for simlar misconduc. They include the departments of health and transport, the Prison Service, the Northern Ireland Office and the Foreign Office.