SEC's Porn Habit Nothing New

Don't worry, folks--this article is indeed safe for work, if you trust your bosses not to fire you for reading articles on the job.

We've all heard the frenzy about the SEC's porn habits--a memo released detailed just how far this business went. For instance, a senior attorney at the Washington SEC spent as long as eight hours a day on porn of some type, going so far as to burn his gathered porn to DVD and CD when his computer ran out of hard drive space. One accountant's efforts to view porn at work had been blocked fully sixteen thousand times, and he only managed to bypass work blocks by using Google Images. Seventeen employees in question were "senior level" employees pulling down salaries of nearly a quarter million bucks annually. One report even detailed an SEC employee who was using SEC computers to run his own private porn business.

Interestingly, while looking for supporting articles about the SEC's porn fetish, I discovered a report dating back around July 2008 about this. Apparently, based on this, the SEC's had trouble for at least the last two years...BEFORE the market crash began in earnest. So it's a fair bet to say that porn contributed to the market crash of 2008--it's an even fairer bet to say that Bernie Madoff got off because someone was watching porn instead of watching him--but this isn't new. And it's something we should keep a better eye on.