A man had access to the Government’s nuclear secrets. Until he uploaded thousands of porn photos to his work computer

Using your work computer for personal things is a delicate area that can be reason for dismissal. This worker from the US Department of Energy has discovered it by force after uploading hundreds of thousands of pornographic images on his company computer.

What has happened? They tell it in 404Medium. In March 2023, the employee wanted to back up his photo collection. He thought he was uploading the images to his personal hard drive, but it was connected to his work computer and he ended up making the copy where it wasn’t. The problem is that it was not a normal collection of photos, but more than 187,000 pornographic images that he had been collecting over several decades. Although he did not lose his job, his mistake has had consequences and the main one is that he has lost his security clearance.

To train AI. The employee defended himself by arguing that this happened during a depressive episode in which he felt “extremely isolated and alone.” One of his distractions at this stage was creating images with AI, specifically “robotic porn.” At first he used his cell phone, but tired of using such a small screen, he thought it was a good idea to upload all his pornographic images to the computer to train the AI. The problem is that he did not upload them to his hard drive, but rather they ended up on the network of a government company.

Goodbye accreditation. The employee did not realize his mistake until six months later. It was the time it took his bosses to investigate the origin of that enormous amount of porn photos flooding their servers. The result was that his security clearance was withdrawn. The Department of Energy is the in charge of supervising the US nuclear arsenalso we are talking about access to very sensitive information. The worker appealed to get it back, but after an exhaustive investigation, they decided not to return it. If he had not appealed, the story would not have been made public.

My boss spies on me. It is one of the reasons that the man presented in his appeal, which compared the investigation to “the Spanish Inquisition.” What does the law say about this? According to expertsAlthough they let us use it for personal things, we should not expect to have privacy on a company-owned computer. Some companies even pre-install software to measure the time employees work.

Control programs. Can they force you to install one of these programs? A few years ago we talked about installing software to control the work of remote employees and Joaquín Muñoz, an expert lawyer in digital law, resolved our doubt: the company cannot force us to install a program of this type if the computer we use to work is ours, but if it belongs to the company they can do so. Of course, they are obliged to report in detail about all the functions of said software.

Image | Gemini

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