COMMENTARY -- Have you performed an exhaustive sector-level check of every nook and cranny of your hard drive recently? If not, you may want to. An ugly trend in pornography is developing and no, it's not the porn itself. It has to do with the disciplining, firing, and in some cases even criminal prosecution of employees on the grounds that they're downloading pornography. Last week, the Register reported that "More than 200 civil servants in the [UK] Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) have been disciplined for surfing the Web for porn during office hours. In the last eight months the staff accessed over 2 million pornographic images, including 18,000 involving child abuse." Nineteen of the staff members were fired, according to a commentary by ZDNet UK editor Andrew Donoghue.
Though there seems to be no question about the abuses in this particular case, Donoghue's commentary draws attention to the sacking's coincidental timing with a previously announced initiative to downsize the DWP by 30,000 people. Laying people off is a tricky business involving all kinds of forms, meetings, HR personnel and attorneys. Donoghue's conspiratorial implication is "what better way to get a head start than to go after the no-brainers first?" The ones with porn on their systems. Especially child porn.
So what's wrong with this picture? For starters, computer users don't have to explicitly request pornographic images in order for them to end up on their hard drives. Thanks to spam, pop-ups, spyware, browser hijacking or something as simple as a mistyped URL, it's relatively simple for images we never asked for to end up in subdirectories on our hard drives that we didn't even know existed. This doesn't even take into account what happens when your system is not physically in your presence.
For two years, an immigrant has been trying to get me to tell his story -- one in which he was fired from his job, sent to jail, permanently saddled with a sex offender's record, and threatened with deportation after his system was confiscated and later found to have child pornography on it. He first contacted me when it looked as though his employer was building a case against him. Two years later, the story of Jack, whose life is now ruined, has since appeared on Wired.com and in The Register. Though I can't possibly attest to his innocence, Jack swears to me that someone in his company had the motive and the means to place incriminating images, including child pornography, on his system. Let's face it: If someone at your place of employment has it in for you, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to place incriminating images onto your system. For Jack, the rest is now history.
Something else is wrong with this picture. Given the very justifiable sensitivity to child pornography, I have questions: First, how can consumers of "legal" pornography accurately pinpoint the ages of the people in the images they're viewing? And if a consumer of "legal" pornography mistakenly opens an image only to discover something that's undeniably child porn, what proof must be offered to convince a judge that there was only interest in "legal" pornography and not child pornography? Is deleting it enough? Or could that be viewed as a cover-up attempt? How about deleting it right away?
I could go on, but you get the picture. These aren't just thorny problems for computer users, but also for employers looking to build cases against certain employees, and courtrooms where the role that technology plays in creating the scene of the crime is generally not very well understood.
You can write to me at david.berlind@cnet.com. If you're looking for my commentaries on other IT topics, check my blog Between the Lines or my archives.
