- Watching porn at work is one thing, but storing it on your work PC?
There are many bizarre reasons why you might get in trouble at work. In fact, we could (and maybe should) write an Oddee article on this topic.
If we did, though, this story would definitely appear toward the top of the list.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) maintains a public repository of disciplinary rulings. A recent entry detailed one doozy of a case.
A man working with a system that maintains American nuclear stockpiles lost his security clearance roughly a year ago. Sounds bad. Did he try to sell secrets to a hostile nation?
Fortunately, it’s nothing that bad. He just uploaded his stash of tens of thousands of AI porn pictures onto his government computer.
It wasn’t intentional, though. He did the data transfer accidentally after hooking his porn drive to his PC because he was tired of squinting his eyes at the tiny screen of his phone.
In his appeal, the man argued that he had depression and his AI porn habit started as a coping method. He also felt that the government was “spying on him” when they investigated his porn collection.
You know, the one that he uploaded into the government system. No, he didn’t get his security clearance back.
A Little Oopsie
The pornographic incident originally happened in March 23, 2023. Well, it likely got its start much earlier than that.
Our man was in the habit of watching porn. He was something of a collector, and over his 30-year-career of viewing naughty images, he had accumulated a frankly impressive collection of them.
In total, he had stored around 187,000 porn pictures on his external drive. To put that into perspective, if you spanked your monkey to one picture a day, it would take you 512 years to go through all of them.
As to what kind of pictures they were, the DOE report isn’t specific. It references “robot pornography,” but we’re not certain if it means the pictures featured robot, or if it means they were AI-generated.
Oh yes, the man had recently gotten into AI-produced porn. In fact, he was so into it that he planned to use his stash to as a base data set to create more porn.
That probably implies that he had a specific thing for something. But we digress.
The man claimed that he didn’t actually watch porn while working. However, he did have a government-issued computer, which he decided to use in an unauthorized manner.
He had been looking at his AI-genned porn on his mobile phone, but he’d gotten tired of its small screen. Wanting to view crisp, high-definition smut, he decided to hook his porno drive to his work computer.
Nobody would ever know, so what’s the harm, right? Surely there was some kind of hard partition between his personal and government file systems.
Well, the harm came when the man decided to back up his external drive to the cloud. Only, he made one small mistake.
Instead of his personal cloud drive, he uploaded his entire porn collection of 187,000 pictures into the DOE system. So, no — there was no partition.
‘Why Did You Upload Porn to the Government?’
At first, the man didn’t realize what he had done. And, to be fair, neither did the government.
It took six months until a DOE contractor noticed something unaccounted for was eating up drive space in the system. Looking into it, they discovered the porn.
Now, you might be able to argue that there should’ve been some kind of immediate safeguard against data injection into the system that houses U.S. nuclear secrets, and you might even have a case. However, you can’t fault the government for not being able to track the source of the unauthorized naughtiness.
Our guy got summoned into what we can assume was an incredibly awkward HR meeting. During it, DOE investigators asked him if he was aware his porn stash had been shared with the government.
He wasn’t, but there was no way he could talk himself out of this. He confessed to accidentally uploading his porn to the DOE network and violating the guidelines on the use of government-issued hardware.
And so, he lost his security clearance, and effectively his job.
A Strange Appeal
However, the DOE allows you to appeal security clearance withdrawal. The results of those hearing are public knowledge, which is why we found out about this case in the first place.
Anyway, in his appeal, the man argued that he had been treated for severe depression since his childhood. Wracked with depression, he had turned to porn as an outlet for his anguish.
“During the depressive episode he felt ‘extremely isolated and lonely,’ and started ‘playing’ with tools that made generative images as a coping strategy, including ‘robot pornography,’ the DOE report reads.
As we said before, he openly admitted that he had violated DOE rules. However, he insisted that he “did not think it was ‘very wrong’ to have adult images on an unclassified computer.”
Additionally, he felt like the government was “spying on him a little too much” when they started investigating his accidental porn upload. He also felt that the HR interview following his discovery was comparable to “the Spanish Inquisition.”
Now, the DOE was willing to hear the man out and his mental health was evaluated by professional psychiatrists. That, however, didn’t help the man’s case out all that much.
The psychiatrists determined that although the man was aware of the “negative consequences” of his porn habit and depression, he remained “under-resourced and undertreated.” Therefore, they deemed it likely that he’d suffer another depressive episode that could involve him committing something strange again.
Also, he did tell government investigators that they were overstepping by investigating his unauthorized porn uploads into the government network. That probably wasn’t a smart move.
Conclusion: his security clearance was not reinstated. Curiously, the report doesn’t state whether the porn was deleted from DOE servers.