6 ms·

SEC and Pornography: Workers Spent Hours on Porn Sites Instead of Stopping Fraud

15 points by anderzole 17y ago

gte910h 17y ago
>Another SEC accountant attempted to access porn sites 16,000 times in a single month. Honestly sounds like a computer worm. 16k accesses is 800 per working day, a little fishy sounding.
- aidenn0 17y ago
  depends; if they are counting each http request, that probably reasonable.
AlexBlom 17y ago
I'm not surprised. A few weeks ago I found that around 60% of my University's bandwidth as tracked as going through porn sites. What have I been missing by not going to lectures??
watmough 17y ago
You know it's funny all this comes out just as the SEC go after Goldman. Not to condone porn-surfing, or supporting prostitution, but look what happened to Elliot Spitzer when he went after Wall Street fraud. Take a step back, and a hard look, before piling on to this stuff. You may be being manipulated, in the easiest way possible.
- kevindication 17y ago
  Yes and no. After all, the SEC is chartered for the purpose of regulating. What would you have them do instead?
- yummyfajitas 17y ago
  The SEC just released two embarrassing reports: the porn report and the Stanford report. Just before releasing those reports, they made a press release about a high profile case which appears to be extremely weak. You are right; the timing of these press releases does suggest we are being manipulated.
  - hga 17y ago
    The Stanford IG report is amazingly damning; from memory, the SEC both determined he was running a scam and sat on that for years, and one of the guys who should have pursued him later became his attorney. Worse in many ways than Madoff.
  - jbooth 17y ago
    That's just silly. Neither of those reports are threats to the SEC, and the SEC is not cohesive in the way a corporation is. Now, you could make a case that the administration gave the SEC a nudge to file the Goldman case in the week before financial reform goes in front of Congress, in an election year. That would make a lot of sense. This is your weekly episode of "examining basic incentives has much more deductive power than blindly applying ideological predispositions".
    - yummyfajitas 17y ago
      The SEC is comprised of people. These people might lose their job or future promotion opportunities if the SEC is embarrassed under their watch, or if their poor management becomes highly public. This gives them an incentive to time press releases to minimize the embarrassment. By the way, why do you feel the SEC is not cohesive?
      - jbooth 17y ago
        To start with, it's governed by a board of political appointees from both parties who fight with each other regularly and don't have a huge amount of shared agenda. They're typically going to have much more loyalty to their party than the SEC. Beyond that, the actual staffers don't "own stock" in the SEC. These things add up to something much less "cohesive" (for lack of a better word) than the effect you get when you put a dozen people who have 80%+ of their net worth in the same company in a room together. Regarding your first point, about people -- yeah. But none of them has a particularly strong incentive to protect the SEC as opposed to themselves -- the SEC isn't a cohesive group in the sense of ideology or in the sense of a corporation. And even if they were, the porn story isn't worth launching a risky investigation over. Like I said, the Obama administration has a definite interest in pushing cases being filed in this particular 3-week window -- the SEC as an institution? Meh. You'd be surprised how many government agencies and employees just plain don't have the hard-edged desire for nefarious political influence. Office politics, sure, that's their livelihood. Advocating their superiors to do things "the right way" as they see it? Sure, who wouldn't. But political influence to the tune of playing the media? They'd be in a political role if that was really what drove them.
- byrneseyeview 17y ago
  I guess your comment is ambiguous: are you saying that we're being manipulated into paying attention to this instead of the Goldman case? Or that the SEC threw together a really weak case against an unpopular company ("vampire squid"?) in order to distract from the highly embarrassing facts about what they weren't doing (arresting someone for fraud) and what they were doing (spanking it). Spitzer had unprotected anal sex with whores a whole lot, but that doesn't have much to do with the fact that he bullied companies into settling by conflating illegal practices (e.g. price-fixing on a million-dollar insurance contract) with hard-to-understand industry standards (contingent commissions).
  - jbooth 17y ago
    Well hang on, you're mad at the SEC because employees were slacking on the internet (breaking!) and they weren't going after the systemic fraud in the financial system.. Then you turn around and after a vulgar cheap shot, attack Spitzer for going after systemic fraud in the financial system? I don't get it. Here's the deal: The SEC has no incentive to launch a major bogus lawsuit over a rumored story-of-the-day that has absolutely no legs and that nobody will remember in a couple weeks. Thinking that they do presumes that A) there's an organized political arm of the SEC and B) said political arm is simultaneously smart enough to know about a report like this weeks ahead of time and dumb enough to misjudge this situation massively, damaging their brand worse by launching a bogus lawsuit to distract from a total non-story. A defendant in a major lawsuit, on the other hand, absolutely has an incentive to try and turn the tables by virtue of something like this. The two are not equivalent. EDIT: To clear up my point, I'd have absolutely no problem believing that part of the timing of the lawsuit was pushed by the administration to support the financial reform currently before Congress. That's an incentive that makes sense. "Oh no we were whacking it" does not.
    - yummyfajitas 17y ago
      A defendant in a major lawsuit, on the other hand, absolutely has an incentive to try and turn the tables by virtue of something like this. The two are not equivalent. Are you somehow suggesting that back in 2008, Goldman persuaded Sen. Chuck Grassley to demand an investigation into porn watching at the SEC? Somehow, back then, they knew that the SEC would make a press release about a weak case they were planning to file against Goldman? And they somehow managed to ensure that the porn report would come out only a week after the investigation into Goldman was released? And somehow, they also happened to know that the SEC was full of porn watchers who can't wait until they get home? That's quite the conspiracy.
- drewda 17y ago
  Is the SEC Porn Story a New Problem, or Political Ploy? http://www.propublica.org/ion/blog/item/financial-regulators-watched-porn-while-economy-spun-into-crisis http://www.propublica.org/ion/blog/item/financial-regulators...
aidenn0 17y ago
This just in: at almost every company with an internet connection, workers spent hours on porn sites instead of doing their job.
dinde 17y ago
This has nothing to do with the SEC in specific, but with workplace internet policies in general. It amazes me how many people have no idea that their internet usage at work is being tracked.
barnaby 17y ago
Wow! I mean, I work remotely, using my own laptop, and once in a while I'll look at porn while I should be working, and I always feel guilty about it. It's certainly not often, but I can't imagine how brazen one has to be to do this while at an office, on a company computer. Wow!
CWuestefeld 17y ago
an employee tried hundreds of times to access pornographic sites and was denied access. When he used a flash drive, he successfully bypassed the filter to visit a "significant number" of porn sites. Huh? How does plugging in a flash drive bypass web filters?
- chaosmachine 17y ago
  Portable Firefox with Tor, or something like that. http://www.torproject.org/torbrowser/ http://www.torproject.org/torbrowser/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Tor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Tor
  - CWuestefeld 17y ago
    Good point, I buy that explanation. IMHO, anybody who's carrying around TOR and using it to bypass an employer's filters so he can get to porn has a real problem. Several years back, me and a coworker looked at the company's DNS servers, curious what names were cached. We were pretty horrified. I guess this kind of thing is pretty widespread, more than "outsiders" would expect -- particularly from a cubicle farm where there's no privacy.
    - digitallogic 17y ago
      At a job in college, a desk jockey ordered porn and used his work address on the purchase. He got caught when the sys admin came across the email w/his receipt in the spam queue. Though he wasn't fired (he did get chewed out) I couldn't look him in the eye after I saw the list of movies he purchased (they were largely she-male dvds).
- dinde 17y ago
  Maybe they meant a wifi stick; I know people who use these to connect to other wifi hotspots from work.
sriram_sun 17y ago
That was a trillion dollar Oops!
elblanco 17y ago
Well that much is obvious.
mkramlich 17y ago
This seems like just one particular case of: <something> and Pornography: <people> Spent Hours on Porn Sites Instead of <something>
bpourriahi 17y ago
Don't blame the workers. Blame the boss.
junklight 17y ago
I like "The employee also said he deliberately disabled a filter in Google to access inappropriate sites" You mean: he turned off the safe search option. Given the rest of the content it seems odd to spin it so that changing an easy to alter option is made to sound like "hacking" but perhaps that is all being spun too!

15 points by anderzole 17y ago

>Another SEC accountant attempted to access porn sites 16,000 times in a single month. Honestly sounds like a computer worm. 16k accesses is 800 per working day, a little fishy sounding.

aidenn0 17y ago
depends; if they are counting each http request, that probably reasonable.

AlexBlom 17y ago

I'm not surprised. A few weeks ago I found that around 60% of my University's bandwidth as tracked as going through porn sites. What have I been missing by not going to lectures??

watmough 17y ago

You know it's funny all this comes out just as the SEC go after Goldman. Not to condone porn-surfing, or supporting prostitution, but look what happened to Elliot Spitzer when he went after Wall Street fraud. Take a step back, and a hard look, before piling on to this stuff. You may be being manipulated, in the easiest way possible.

kevindication 17y ago
Yes and no. After all, the SEC is chartered for the purpose of regulating. What would you have them do instead?
yummyfajitas 17y ago
The SEC just released two embarrassing reports: the porn report and the Stanford report. Just before releasing those reports, they made a press release about a high profile case which appears to be extremely weak. You are right; the timing of these press releases does suggest we are being manipulated.
- hga 17y ago
  The Stanford IG report is amazingly damning; from memory, the SEC both determined he was running a scam and sat on that for years, and one of the guys who should have pursued him later became his attorney. Worse in many ways than Madoff.
- jbooth 17y ago
  That's just silly. Neither of those reports are threats to the SEC, and the SEC is not cohesive in the way a corporation is. Now, you could make a case that the administration gave the SEC a nudge to file the Goldman case in the week before financial reform goes in front of Congress, in an election year. That would make a lot of sense. This is your weekly episode of "examining basic incentives has much more deductive power than blindly applying ideological predispositions".
  - yummyfajitas 17y ago
    The SEC is comprised of people. These people might lose their job or future promotion opportunities if the SEC is embarrassed under their watch, or if their poor management becomes highly public. This gives them an incentive to time press releases to minimize the embarrassment. By the way, why do you feel the SEC is not cohesive?
    - jbooth 17y ago
      To start with, it's governed by a board of political appointees from both parties who fight with each other regularly and don't have a huge amount of shared agenda. They're typically going to have much more loyalty to their party than the SEC. Beyond that, the actual staffers don't "own stock" in the SEC. These things add up to something much less "cohesive" (for lack of a better word) than the effect you get when you put a dozen people who have 80%+ of their net worth in the same company in a room together. Regarding your first point, about people -- yeah. But none of them has a particularly strong incentive to protect the SEC as opposed to themselves -- the SEC isn't a cohesive group in the sense of ideology or in the sense of a corporation. And even if they were, the porn story isn't worth launching a risky investigation over. Like I said, the Obama administration has a definite interest in pushing cases being filed in this particular 3-week window -- the SEC as an institution? Meh. You'd be surprised how many government agencies and employees just plain don't have the hard-edged desire for nefarious political influence. Office politics, sure, that's their livelihood. Advocating their superiors to do things "the right way" as they see it? Sure, who wouldn't. But political influence to the tune of playing the media? They'd be in a political role if that was really what drove them.
byrneseyeview 17y ago
I guess your comment is ambiguous: are you saying that we're being manipulated into paying attention to this instead of the Goldman case? Or that the SEC threw together a really weak case against an unpopular company ("vampire squid"?) in order to distract from the highly embarrassing facts about what they weren't doing (arresting someone for fraud) and what they were doing (spanking it). Spitzer had unprotected anal sex with whores a whole lot, but that doesn't have much to do with the fact that he bullied companies into settling by conflating illegal practices (e.g. price-fixing on a million-dollar insurance contract) with hard-to-understand industry standards (contingent commissions).
- jbooth 17y ago
  Well hang on, you're mad at the SEC because employees were slacking on the internet (breaking!) and they weren't going after the systemic fraud in the financial system.. Then you turn around and after a vulgar cheap shot, attack Spitzer for going after systemic fraud in the financial system? I don't get it. Here's the deal: The SEC has no incentive to launch a major bogus lawsuit over a rumored story-of-the-day that has absolutely no legs and that nobody will remember in a couple weeks. Thinking that they do presumes that A) there's an organized political arm of the SEC and B) said political arm is simultaneously smart enough to know about a report like this weeks ahead of time and dumb enough to misjudge this situation massively, damaging their brand worse by launching a bogus lawsuit to distract from a total non-story. A defendant in a major lawsuit, on the other hand, absolutely has an incentive to try and turn the tables by virtue of something like this. The two are not equivalent. EDIT: To clear up my point, I'd have absolutely no problem believing that part of the timing of the lawsuit was pushed by the administration to support the financial reform currently before Congress. That's an incentive that makes sense. "Oh no we were whacking it" does not.
  - yummyfajitas 17y ago
    A defendant in a major lawsuit, on the other hand, absolutely has an incentive to try and turn the tables by virtue of something like this. The two are not equivalent. Are you somehow suggesting that back in 2008, Goldman persuaded Sen. Chuck Grassley to demand an investigation into porn watching at the SEC? Somehow, back then, they knew that the SEC would make a press release about a weak case they were planning to file against Goldman? And they somehow managed to ensure that the porn report would come out only a week after the investigation into Goldman was released? And somehow, they also happened to know that the SEC was full of porn watchers who can't wait until they get home? That's quite the conspiracy.
drewda 17y ago
Is the SEC Porn Story a New Problem, or Political Ploy? http://www.propublica.org/ion/blog/item/financial-regulators-watched-porn-while-economy-spun-into-crisis http://www.propublica.org/ion/blog/item/financial-regulators...

aidenn0 17y ago

This just in: at almost every company with an internet connection, workers spent hours on porn sites instead of doing their job.

dinde 17y ago

This has nothing to do with the SEC in specific, but with workplace internet policies in general. It amazes me how many people have no idea that their internet usage at work is being tracked.

barnaby 17y ago

Wow! I mean, I work remotely, using my own laptop, and once in a while I'll look at porn while I should be working, and I always feel guilty about it. It's certainly not often, but I can't imagine how brazen one has to be to do this while at an office, on a company computer. Wow!

CWuestefeld 17y ago

an employee tried hundreds of times to access pornographic sites and was denied access. When he used a flash drive, he successfully bypassed the filter to visit a "significant number" of porn sites. Huh? How does plugging in a flash drive bypass web filters?

chaosmachine 17y ago
Portable Firefox with Tor, or something like that. http://www.torproject.org/torbrowser/ http://www.torproject.org/torbrowser/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Tor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Tor
- CWuestefeld 17y ago
  Good point, I buy that explanation. IMHO, anybody who's carrying around TOR and using it to bypass an employer's filters so he can get to porn has a real problem. Several years back, me and a coworker looked at the company's DNS servers, curious what names were cached. We were pretty horrified. I guess this kind of thing is pretty widespread, more than "outsiders" would expect -- particularly from a cubicle farm where there's no privacy.
  - digitallogic 17y ago
    At a job in college, a desk jockey ordered porn and used his work address on the purchase. He got caught when the sys admin came across the email w/his receipt in the spam queue. Though he wasn't fired (he did get chewed out) I couldn't look him in the eye after I saw the list of movies he purchased (they were largely she-male dvds).
dinde 17y ago
Maybe they meant a wifi stick; I know people who use these to connect to other wifi hotspots from work.

sriram_sun 17y ago

That was a trillion dollar Oops!

elblanco 17y ago

Well that much is obvious.

mkramlich 17y ago

This seems like just one particular case of: <something> and Pornography: <people> Spent Hours on Porn Sites Instead of <something>

bpourriahi 17y ago

Don't blame the workers. Blame the boss.

junklight 17y ago

I like "The employee also said he deliberately disabled a filter in Google to access inappropriate sites" You mean: he turned off the safe search option. Given the rest of the content it seems odd to spin it so that changing an easy to alter option is made to sound like "hacking" but perhaps that is all being spun too!