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U.S. Government Crippled by Sex, Gaming Sites
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Oct 05, 2006 03:48 PM
from the i-would-too-if-i-was-a-civil-servant dept.
from the i-would-too-if-i-was-a-civil-servant dept.
BobB writes "The U.S. Department of the Interior's inspector general has released a report that says department employees are wasting their taxpayer-funded work time going to prohibited web sites. Some of these sites relate to sex, computer games, gambling and auctions. The study found that almost $2 billion a year in productivity was being lost to these 'excessive indulgences.'" From the article: "Computer-use logs revealed more than 4,732 entries relating to sexually explicit Web sites and gambling sites. Some computers accessed sex sites for 30 to 60 minutes during the test period. More than 1 million log entries were discovered indicating 7,763 Department computer users spent 2,004-plus hours accessing game and auction sites. Extrapolated over the year, that could account for 100,000 lost work hours. Put another way, this would equal 50 full-time employees doing nothing but surfing online game and auction sites."
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IT: Extent of Government Computers Infected By Bots Uncertain 96 comments
Krishna Dagli writes to mention findings by the company Trend Micro on the extent of bot infection in U.S. Government computers. The article by Information Week indicates that, while the 'original' findings were much harsher, the security vendor has since backed down from some of its claims. Still, the extent to which information-stealing software has penetrated our national infrastructure is enough to take note. From the article: "While it may be tempting to discount the warnings of security vendors as self serving--bot fever means more business for Trend Micro--there's unanimity about the growing risk of cybercrime. In its list of the top 10 computer security developments to watch for in 2007, released last week, the SANS Institute warns that targeted attacks will become more prevalent, particularly against government agencies. 'Targeted cyber attacks by nation states against U.S. government systems over the past three years have been enormously successful, demonstrating the failure of federal cyber security activities,' SANS director of research Alan Paller says in an e-mail. 'Other antagonistic nations and terrorist groups, aware of the vulnerabilities, will radically expand the number of attacks.'"
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Who's doing it, tho? (Score:4, Interesting)
In a couple of prior jobs executives and managers were the ones caught with gobs of pr0n on their computers. On was actually walked out the door while we all watched, his computer had been examined by the techs and was crammed with child pr0n. Dunno if he was prosecuted, I certainly hope so.
We have logs of our sites activities, too, which can be linked directly to users. I haven't heard of anyone getting the dusting for it, possibly because half the staff in Personnel are surfing while their boss tells me how busy they are and can't do some work which truly belongs to their department.
Even I do a little surfing, but usually during breaks or while waiting for some task to run.
Re:Who's doing it, tho? (Score:5, Funny)
Not Me!
I waste my time at work reading Slashdot
er... wait a minute....
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
So to this story, you could almost reply, "Would it make ya feel any betta, if they was just surfin Slashdot?"
*Please, please, don't make a pro/anti-gun flamewar branch off of this, I beg you.
Re:Who's doing it, tho? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Hmmm (Score:5, Funny)
I just have one question: are they taking applications?
Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
so 30 minutes a week???? sounds like someone is wasting time, the ones who composed this report.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Funny)
I dunno, but if there are that many government employees going to auction sites, I'm gonna go try to sell my hammer on eBay for $600...
Parent
50 full time employees (Score:2, Funny)
But out of how many? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Just wondering
ZK
Mod parent up! (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, for 50,000 employees, they'd have to spend 12 minutes out of an 8 hour day to get those numbers.
25,000 employees would require 24 minutes out of an 8 hour day.
And so forth. These "statistics" are meaningless without knowing how many TOTAL employees there are and what the mean and median are. Are there 10,000 employees and 5 of them spend 10 hours a day surfing junk while everyone thinks they're working? And the rest of the "hours" are people surfing junk sites during lunch?
Parent
Re:But out of how many? And where are they (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah, bet you forgot that they're part of the Department of the Interior, didn't you?
Parent
Lies, damned lies, statistics and reporters. (Score:5, Interesting)
E.G. The United states spends 1million hours per year blinking -- Just think how much time we could save if we could outlaw blinking
Parent
Now we know why gov't sucks (Score:4, Insightful)
err...wait a sec
Perspective (Score:4, Insightful)
How fast does $2 Billion get used in Iraq? I'm all for efficiency, but lets have it across the board.
Productivity? (Score:5, Insightful)
>
> How fast does $2 Billion get used in Iraq? I'm all for efficiency, but lets have it across the board.
A better question: What economic output are these DOI employees (and for that matter, our mercenaries working for private contractors at 5-10 times the expense of an enlisted serviceman/woman) supposed to be creating that's worth $2B per year? In order to speak meaningfully of productivity, one first must be in the business of producing stuff.
This is government work. Nothing's being produced, only consumed.
Parent
Re:Productivity? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is government work. Nothing's being produced, only consumed."
this statement shows a lack of understanding of economics. A person may have no other job than to facilitate the division of labour. Someone who answers phones produces nothing, but may in fact be far more valuable to productivity than any other single laberour in the production line.
If no person was specifically assigned to answer the phone, then a production line of 100 workers would need to shut down completely each time the phone rings.
So if the production line (employing 100 labourers) needed to stop for 3 hours each day due to the necessity of answering phone calls then hiring a single person to answer the phone in effect gains you an entire 300 hours of productivity. and a single secretary to answer phones may in fact this way create 300 hours of PRODUCTION. Not only this but s/he would answer the phone more efficiently and probably be more skilled at communicating on it since this is all s/he does. And yet.. at the end of the day... the secretary did not personally directly "produce" anything at all (by your mode of calculation).
The government is in the business of making sure that you can trust other people to honour their contracts with you and not stab you in the back on your way out the door; in protecting your property when you aren't looking, and in making sure the products you buy are relatively safe for you to use, and actually do what you were promised they would do. And to provide certain other services to make the cost of you raising a productive family cheaper than it otherwise would be.
The effort of you trying to defend yourself, provide your own security and enforce your own contracts would far exceed what you pay the government to provide this service. So the government is to that extent : MAKING YOU MORE PRODUCTIVE.
A bank would not loan you money at some fairly low interest rate except that the government is going to step in and FORCE you to pay back your loan. Thus the government makes the cost of you borrowing money cheaper. I could go on with dozens of additional examples. A good government SAVES YOU MONEY.
This is exactly the same as if it was the government which was being productive in the first place, since the end result is the same
Parent
It's all legitimate, I tell ya! (Score:5, Funny)
Not me... (Score:5, Funny)
(reload)(reload)(reload)(reload)Yay, new article!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
(reads headline) Oh... interesting... apparently C++ has died... again...
in further news (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
I would want more information. (Score:5, Insightful)
I know LOTS of people that use their lunch hour to surf the net or stay late and play video games after 5PM. I don't consider that unethical.
Similarly, I don't think it is wrong to spend 15 minutes checking out an ebay auction or reading your personal email, while some addict goes outside and smokes a ciggarette/takes a coffee break.
Without more information, this looks like a rabble rousing report instead of something usefull.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, but... porn at work??? Unethical or not, that's just nasty...
Just ask the private sector how to fix this. (Score:2)
Well instead of monitoring this issue, why don't they get some proxy servers and firewalls running to stop them. Corporations have been doing this since the series of tubes was invented.
http://religiousfreaks.com/ [religiousfreaks.com]Re:Just ask the private sector how to fix this. (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is, the "US Government" is dozens of departments, with hundreds of different divisions inside of some of those departments... and that's not counting the military.
A lot of parts of the federal government do exactly what you describe... but it's not a consistent thing throughout, nor should it be, really.
For instance, in one of the (U.S. Navy) office buildings I've done work in, where they have normal (for the military) 0700-1600 work hours, they have firewalls with site blockers, and the like. But go to another base a few miles away, and you'll be able to surf pretty much whatever you want. It's still against policy to look at porn or gamble, but there's nothing actually stopping you from doing so. And that's within the same organization...
But to address another issue... what exactly are these people doing? If these are workers in an office, and they're spending an hour a day, during the normal workday, looking at Ebay, they should be reprimanded. But if this is a park ranger, or an emergency worker, just sitting by his desk, with nothing to do until a call comes in... then what productivity are you really affecting?
Parent
Seriously. (Score:2)
I bet this report doesn't take into account people having multiple browsers or tabs open at the same time. Hell, if you looked at my logs it would look like all I did was surf slashdot all day. I can work and keep a tab for breaks open at the same time.
The water cooler (Score:2)
i hope there is no "blame the internet" bs (Score:5, Insightful)
it's just that logfiles make it easy to actually quantify this lost productivity for the first time. but in fact, one could make the case that the internet allows users to waste their time more... um... efficiently (snicker)
From the OIG's letter (Score:2)
Can anyone please identify when a government agency should have employees using government equipment on government time to fundraise for external organizations? I can't think of any examples where it should be legally sanctioned and/or permissible by bureau policy.
Read a book when you're not busy! (Score:2)
Of course, if these workers have all that time left to surf the web, maybe they're redundant. Then again, if you take that route and start laying off, then you wind up with not enough trained workers during crunch time.
Yup. The practical solution is the middle ground: establish a website whitelist including only essential sites to look at, and give 'em books to read. In fact, what I did as a manager was reach a compromise by adding gutenberg.org and slashdot to the whitelist;
Those are some high paid 50 people! (Score:5, Insightful)
I didn't RTFA, but this would imply that those 50 full time employees have a bill + production rate of $40,000,000/year. Or roughly $20,000 dollars an hour. Unless the 50 employees they are talking about are lobbyist, I just don't see this as accurate.
-Rick
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
These "studies" all have the same flaw (Score:2, Insightful)
Kinda meaningless (Score:2)
I wonder how many full-time-employee-equivalents it would take to cover all of the time that DOI employees spend eating, in the restroom, etc? And are those crises too?
-b
A common problem (Score:5, Interesting)
And strangely enough, in my free time while administering some fairly sizable gaming forums, I've actually had to ban users with hostmasks indicating they were using government internet connections. I even went to the trouble of tracking down the name of one individual and contacting their boss about their behavior. It's suprising how badly some professionals will behave at work when they think nobody's watching.
(And yes, IT is watching you. Always watching.)
Boy am I glad I don't work in IT anymore.
Re:A common problem (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, small things like deploying antiviruses, re-imaging the hard-disks, firewalling known threats, whatever the hell the good amins are supposed to do?
Self-righteous assholes like you give the rest of the I.T. folks an (undeserved) bad rep.
Parent
Re:A common problem (Score:4, Informative)
As far as spying on users and getting them fired goes, that wasn't my department. I managed the hardware and software on machines, not the company firewalls and proxy and such. I agree with your statement that the admins probably should have just been firewalling off applications like Napster and blocking known inappropriate websites. Nonetheless, the issue remains: These people were doing entirely inappropriate things with government property and then leaving it to me and other people in IT to clean up after them.
I have always taken users' privacy very seriously, because I take *my* privacy very seriously. It doesn't take illegal spying or other illicit activities to notice when a user is doing completely retarded things using company resources. When the office T3 is getting modem-level throughput, it's pretty hard to not notice a bunch of connections open on napster ports from specific users' machines. If you're suggesting that a government employee has a right to do as they please with government computers and internet connections, how do you feel about what Mark Foley did with *his* government resources?
If being offended by highly paid individuals wasting time on the job instead of helping maintain the country's infrastructure makes me self-righteous, then that label is entirely accurate. As it stands, I'm no longer in IT because I hated working for the government and I hated working in IT. I make best-selling video games now.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Rational analysis (Score:5, Insightful)
Lets look at the numbers. Over a week they counted about 7,000 employees going to illicit sites. This represents about than 1% of the 70,000 employees of the DOI. Furthermore they found that these employees spent 2000 hours on these illicit sites, or perhaps 15 minutes a day during the test week.
From these stated fact, they found three interesting things. First, the wasted time represented 50 employees, or less than 0.1% of the workforce. Second they found that the internet use represented about 24 hours of internet use, presumable bandwidth. They then took this 24 hour number and, presumable, combined it with the total budget of the DOI, 10.4 billion, realized that 24 hours was one fifth of a week, and came up with 2 billion dollars in loss.
So here is what we have. 1% of the employees, wasting 0.1% of the potential productive time of the DOI, uses 20% of the budget. This result does not indicate a problem with the employees, but a fundamental issue with the process of budgeting and managing money. Any structure that exposes 20% of the budget to risk due to the actions of 1% of the employees is surely inadequate.
Now, the article did state that 'some' computers were accessing sites that would normally be considered uncool for work, and certainly those few people at those 'some' computer can be handled by management, unless those people are themselves high ranking officials that cannot be easily reprimanded. One wonders why those 'some' computers are even allowed to go to those sites.
In the end it shows the lack of logical skills possessed by the average reporter, and, i fear, by posting it on /., the lack of logic skills of the average geek..
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
you mean like every corporation?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
But this has to be taken with some perspective.
Next week, the report will be about how bathroom breaks cost the government 2.5 million dollars and that smoke and coffee break are actually a sinkhole at over 4 million dollars.
The study is talking about 15 minutes per day.
This stems from the stupid assumption that people have to be performing at work for (at least) 8h straight (somehow, those studies never talk about unpaid overtime...). The y talk productivity with metrics that are highly ir
Article Incorrect on Amount (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.doioig.gov/upload/InternetUsage1.txt [doioig.gov]
.xxx (Score:3, Insightful)
Simply block
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not wrong to expect your employees to work. So you set up a policy that says th