Daily Mail: A U.S. Department of Labor employee admitted last that he downloaded pornography on his government computer every day for months while on the job, but it took the cabinet-level agency 15 weeks to fire him. Documents obtained by Daily Mail Online through a Freedom Of Information Act request show that the unnamed staffer was terminated in December, nearly four months after a co-worker blew the whistle on him with a formal complaint.
Investigators with the agency’s Office of Inspector General seized his hard drive and learned he had ‘visited pornographic sites for several hours a day’ in the first eight months of 2014. The man claimed he started feeding his habit by searching for pictures of actress Alyssa Milano on his work computer.
The Labor Department reports are heavily redacted to mask the identity of the man, who said he was ‘addicted’ to porn. His accuser initially suspected he was viewing child pornography, but a forensic analysis of his hard drive determined that wasn’t the case. Still, investigators found that he had ‘downloaded a voluminous amount of adult pornographic movies and images.’
The man also admitted he had been fired from another job in the past for ‘accessing sites with women wearing little clothing,’ according to a report of his October 2014 interview.
The department’s inspector general sends a report to Congress twice each year. The most recent one, issued May 29, said the investigation focused on ‘a Grade 14 employee.’ That’s a reference to the federal government’s salary scale for non-executive employees, which spans 15 grades. Together with a nearly 25 per cent boost for the cost of living in Washington, D.C., his salary was between $107,325 and $139,523, depending on his responsibilities and seniority.
The report said the man told investigators that during a two-week period when the agency was migrating to cloud computing, he ‘entered the name of actress Alyssa Milano on [his] computer and pornographic sites appeared,’ according to a report of his interview. Milano, the child actress co-star of the 1980s TV comedy ‘Who’s the Boss?,’ broke into movie roles in her twenties and was known for fearlessly shooting nude scenes.
The porn-surfing employee told investigators that Microsoft’s Bing search engine also helped him feed his addiction, since he learned he could use it on a government network to find pornography.
A FOIA officer from the Office of Inspector General informed Daily Mail Online Wednesday in a letter that her office ‘would not be providing copies of the pornography-related evidence’ in the case along with the documents. Because the Labor Department did not specify its criteria for determining that no child pornography was involved, Daily Mail Online is appealing that decision.
In 2013 a Health and Human Services acting director of cyber security expert was kept on the job for eight months after his indictment on child pornography charges. He spent seven of those months in federal custody, but remained on the government payroll. Timothy DeFoggi was ultimately convicted of engaging in a child exploitation enterprise, conspiring to advertise and distribute child pornography, and accessing a computer with the intent to view child pornography.
The OIG did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the 2014 investigation, specifically about whether the fired employee was placed on administrative leave during the investigation.
DCG