"What were they thinking?" These words enter our minds as we read stories of public employees caught viewing adult or child pornography from their government cubicles. And yet, the same stories are told over an over again with no sign of a learning curve to curtail such behavior.

This week, Senator Chuck Grassley called for a larger investigation into the behavior of employees at the National Science Foundation (NSF), who were called out by a November Inspector General's report for watching, downloading and e-mailing porn for significant chunks of time over the course of several months, an in some cases, years.

The report also highlights the actions of a "senior official" identified as “viewing sexually explicit images and engaging in sexually explicit online ‘chats’ with various women.” Such actions do not come without a price tag either. According to the investigators, this employee's actions alone accounted for over $58,000 in lost productivity, although we are unsure if that is from "carpal tunnel syndrome" or simply from not doing work. 

When interviewed, the employee acknowledged using his NSF computer to visit pornographic websites and admitted that he spent excessive time chatting with women at the sites during official government work hours. Pathetically, investigators determined that the employee charged in excess of $40,000 to his personal credit card over a 24-month period to cover the cost of his porn addiction. Now that's a stimulus plan!

On another occasion, an NSF staff member reported hearing explicit sounds from a co-worker’s computer speakers. After reviewing the employee's browsing history, investigators found that the employee had spent considerable time on pornographic sites during business hours.

The investigation uncovered a number of incidents, including:

- An NSF employee whose network drive contained numerous sexually explicit image files. 
- An NSF employee who violated NSF's computer use policy by downloading and storing inappropriate images on her NSF computer drive. NSF verbally reprimanded the employee.
- An employee whose network drive contained numerous sexually explicit media files, two copies of peer-to-peer file sharing software, and website favorites (bookmarks) with sexually descriptive titles. The employee acknowledged saving the sexually explicit files on his network drive and having peer-to-peer software. NSF suspended the employee for 10 days.
- An employee who violated NSF computer use policies by downloading a large number of sexually explicit media files. The employee served a 10-day suspension. 

Investigators note in the report that the abuses laid out above were identified during the selective sampling of network drives and in no way represents a comprehensive sweep of NSF computers. Thus, it's safe to say the porn problem at NSF is significantly larger than these few cases.

The report stated:

"Because of the number of inappropriate use cases that were investigated by OIG, we selectively sampled only one of NSF’s numerous network drives for large files and reviewed a limited number of these files to see if we could deter-
mine if employees were violating NSF’s computer use policies...While these cases show that such misbehavior occurs at NSF, the limited nature of this sampling and its restriction to only one computer drive (and excluding other systems like e-mail) cannot measure the actual extent of such misbehavior at NSF."

NSF has since installed filtering software that blocks access to inappropriate websites - a step most agencies took years ago. But while the good ole days of porn surfing at NSF are over, the fallout is not. Senator Grassley’s office has asked NSF to turn over all reports about the examination of the NSF network drive by Thursday.

“The semiannual report raises real questions about how the National Science Foundation manages its resources, and Congress ought to demand a full accounting before it gives the agency another $3 billion in the stimulus bill,” Grassley said in a letter to NSF.