U.S. Government Crippled by Sex, Gaming Sites 283
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."
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....
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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.
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(ehem)
"I think guns are the best thing in the whole world, 'cause I hate them and they're awful. Because of that, you suck."
Rebuttals welcome.
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Some weeks it must be close to 40 hours for me - pity I'm here for more than 80. Waiting for people to go home before I can work on the systems they use is annoying.
Re:Who's doing it, tho? (Score:5, Insightful)
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If it's illegal then he's hardly any safer at home than at work (either way, he risks going to jail).
If it's not illegal then it depends on his boss and his wife. If both of them object to what he's doing then he'd probably rather risk his job than his marriage (particularly if there are kids involved in the marriage).
Whether his boss or his wife should object in the first place is another question entirely.
My company allows it (Score:2)
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.
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Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
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Sorry for the post that adds absolutely nothing to the discussion. Please mod me to hell for it, I can afford the karma anyway - but it is a good lesson in doing statistics properly. I mean, the number of people surfing the web at this moment, across the whole planet, I mean, the global economy must be losing BILLIONS, right?!?!?!
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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...
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50 full time employees (Score:2, Funny)
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But out of how many? (Score:2, Insightful)
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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?
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?
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
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.
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As for the DOI, a very brief search of their website shows the following statistics:
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
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Except of course stable social institutions that allow business to flourish. I'd like to see the private sector maintain itself without the rule of law and a police force to enforce the law. Not only that but a monetary institution that allows fair commerce. If anything it is private industry that benefits the most from government.
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1 week [boston.com]
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In short: It's the Michael Jordan of armed combat, and is compensated accordingly.
It's all legitimate, I tell ya! (Score:5, Funny)
Not me... (Score:5, Funny)
(reload)(reload)(reload)(reload)Yay, new article!
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(reads headline) Oh... interesting... apparently C++ has died... again...
in further news (Score:3, Funny)
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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.
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Yeah, but... porn at work??? Unethical or not, that's just nasty...
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Get 2 identical computers. On computer number 1, open an e-bay web page.
On computer number 2, open the same e-bay web page, and then open microsoft word.
Now, to the web monitoring system, it looks like both computers are "USING" the auction page, but a human could be composing memos in microsoft word on computer number 2.
How do they know how long someone sat and read a web page? The only way to do that is to have another human standing over your shoulder watching, and I'm p
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?
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And you'd only charge them $1.9 billion for it! They could say that they're saving $100 million!!
I'd probably undercut you for maybe $1.7 billion, though.
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)
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While I didn't miss the humour there, I think there is more than a grain of truth to that statement. At least if they are surfing websites they are at their desk. If the phone rings, or someone walks over to discuss something they can stop what they're doing and get straight back to work. If they've sneaked off somewhere to read a magazine/have a smoke/whatever, they're not immediately available.
Ult
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.
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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
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Otherwise, I'd like to speak to someone about my tax dollars.
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These "studies" all have the same flaw (Score:2, Insightful)
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Simple solution... (Score:2)
Post a policy, make everyone attend an "awareness" class, make them sign off on it. Make sure they all understand they are being watched and this sort of thing won't be tolerated.
Have the policy contain some
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It's not wrong to expect your employees to work. So you set up a policy that says th
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Many had viruses that were found to have originated from web-based e-mail, causing major headaches and lots of downtime. I had this happen once at a hospital and that was all she wrote for web-based e-mail.
Many viruses contain their own SMTP engine, so the easy way to detect and neutralize them is to have your firewall block port 25 communications to/from any system EXCEPT your authorized mail servers. Your monitoring agent
For Crying Out Loud... (Score:2)
Time spent on a given site (Score:2)
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.
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.
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Firing them? Wouldn't a warning have sufficed? (Score:2)
See, now, when my office had this problem back in the days of True Napster, they just emailed everybody to say that the internet usage policy banned this sort of thing, and the problem went away without them losing any valuable, trained employees.
That's the difference between companies that value their workers and those that seem them as a commodity.
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That's actually quite a good ratio (Score:2)
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..
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you mean like every corporation?
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Come again? 7,000/70,000=10%, so 1 out of 10 employees - a more substantial number. However, I doubt that all 70K of the employees have a computer - janitor, etc.
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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
OUTRAGE! (Score:2)
I demand that they hire 50 more employees to surf my sites to even the playing field.
They're lucky I don't work for the government (Score:2)
logging (Score:2)
No I certainly do not blame the users for having to deal with insecure software provided by paid third party vendors. I don't care what you think it is simply not the users fault if their machine gets owned, the responsible
party is the software vendor.
Anothier simple solution - driftnet (Score:2)
Nothing like a public humiliation.... Of course the flip side is people intentionally trying to make it on there....
-Em
Stock the Break Room (Score:2)
Same problem across the board. If we learned anything from the Clinton years, it's the desperate need for a White House bordello.
-kgj
Sites? (Score:2)
This is bad? (Score:2)
The only limits on the growth of a bureaucracy are the competence of the denizens.
Before computers people wasted time other ways (Score:2)
- Smoke breaks every 15 minutes
- Judicious use of the restroom (with porno mag in hand)
- Trips to the store (you know to buy stuff for work and just about anything else you can do while not in the office)
So the point is that time wasted surfing websites is probably not any worse then other time wasted and all these things are not cummulative. I mean at some point your boss is going to notice if you don't get a single thing done in a given week.Oh yea! (Score:2)
I want an admin job for the state... (Score:2)
If you can log the traffic, you can block it.
goofing off at work (Score:2, Insightful)
So what they need to do is find more work for them or fire 50-100 of there full time employees for surfing the net to much and and not replace them, problem solved.
New Study Results (Score:2, Funny)
Article Incorrect on Amount (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.doioig.gov/upload/InternetUsage1.txt [doioig.gov]
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This is the answer! (Score:2)
For that matter, send one to Congress as well, but I think we know that we can dispense with the eBay and gaming links on that one.
This government is not nearly crippled enough.
Upon further review... (Score:2)
</troll>
$2billion is bullsh*t (Score:2)
People have been wasting time since the idea of "job" was invented.
At my company... (Score:2)
They are very aggressive about this kinda stuff because otherwise their insurance will go through the roof.
---
And yes.. I am home sick today.
So if they break out Foley's surfing (Score:2)
I hate studies (Score:2)
.xxx (Score:3, Insightful)
Simply block
WOW!!!! Where to start... (Score:2)
Also, how do they know you're on the site for 30-60 minutes? If I open a website, then minimize it or leave it up with my screen locked, is it clocking that time? Hell, I could be "surfing the web for 8 hours a day".
4,000 -7,000 entries sounds like a lot, but lets break that down. I got to site A, which pulls adds for sites B and C. Is their system going to log that as 1 site or 3? I would need to know all of the de
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Of course, if they were late as hell, did below average work, and still spent an hour each day perusing eBay, they're going to be out on their ass real fucking quick.
Did you do the math? (Score:2)