Two-dozen past and present Securities and Exchange Commission employees are probably breathing easier. The reason? A federal judge ruled against making their names public after they got caught watching pornography and other sexual images on the job.
In a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed this May, Denver attorney Kevin Evans had argued that government workers who “knowingly and intentionally” used taxpayer-financed property to engage in misconduct had no right to privacy. In a ruling last week, U.S. District Judge Christine Arguello disagreed.
Not only were their privacy rights intact, Arguello wrote in an interesting line of judicial reasoning, but those rights were reinforced “by the sexual nature of the misconduct,” which involved employees’ “needs and/or desires, and in at least one instance, an admitted long-standing addiction to Internet pornography.” In addition, Arguello wrote, the SEC had already disclosed enough information about its response to the misconduct.
In a phone interview, Evans said his firm had not decided whether to appeal.
For anyone needing a refresher on this episode, the SEC employees—some earning six-figure salaries—were among 33 commission staff and contractors found by the agency’s inspector general to have accessed sites like spankwire.com and fetishland.com on their government computers since 2005, according to filings in Evans’ suit.
One regional office examiner used a flash drive to bypass the commission’s Internet filter; a senior attorney at SEC headquarters downloaded so much material that he exhausted his computer’s hard drive.
The 24 workers made up a tiny fraction of the SEC’s workforce of almost 4,000. Although eight resigned, no one was actually fired, according to a compilation by the agency. Of the remaining 16, nine were either counseled or reprimanded (with one reprimanded employee also having to make an eight-hour payment to the leave bank). The final six were suspended from one to 14 days.
Among other court filings is a submission from one of the employees who left. Identified only as “John Doe,” the ex-SEC staffer wrote that disclosure of his identity would “cause me severe personal and professional harm including embarrassment and disgrace, as well as the possible loss of my current job, future employment opportunities and the ability to earn a living.”
The obvious question (one not germane to the lawsuit) that critics might pose: Why he didn’t think of that a little sooner.
