104,000 Hours Wasted Annually at US Interior Dept.

Government Computer News is reporting that a 15-page Inspector General's report on time wasted by workers at the U.S. Department of the Interior has raised such a stir that the Dept.'s own servers have seen major slowdowns due to excessive downloads of the report.

The IG's report, entitled "Excessive Indulgences: Personal Use of the Internet at the Department of the Interior," estimates that an average of 104,221 work hours per year are wasted by DOI employees alone, simply by those perusing Internet gaming sites. The report cited thousands of collected logs from users' computers showing workers spending between eight and fourteen hours at a time on gaming sites.

But perhaps even more revealing, the report stated that efforts to curb government workers' time-wasting initiatives have either been hilariously ineffective, or have been cut short due to -- of all things -- time constraints.

For instance, the Office of Surface Mining is said to use Web monitoring software as a matter of policy. Despite that fact, says the IG's report, "one OSM official told us that they do not routinely review and monitor Internet usage data, rendering the system useless for any real proactive measures."

For the Office to investigate the logs its monitoring software does generate, the report goes on, a formal request has to be received from a supervisor, who would probably need to provide evidence for probable cause. The evidence, of course, is in the logs, which can't be accessed without permission.

The IG's investigation did turn up one computer which contained 30,000 pieces of child pornography. The user was immediately arrested and indicted, and has since received an eight-year prison sentence. Two other employees were also indicted for child pornography charges, and received 21-month sentences.

In the case of the Bureau of Reclamation, the installation of Web monitoring software, the report states, may have actually contributed to workers' interest in accessing sexually explicit Web sites, simply on account of having to jump through hoops to get there. One other bureau only managed to adopt Web blocking software just last August, although a spot test of that software yielding laughable results. Testers were able to use the logs themselves as a guide for how to bypass policy controls.

"Based on our findings," the Inspector General's report states, "we believe that the Department and Bureaus would do well not to be lulled into a false sense of security that these filtering tools provide a significant level of protection. Instead, reports generated by these filtering tools should be routinely reviewed to promptly identify prohibited activity and close the gap in the software capabilities."

The GCN story states that DOI network users complaining about current lag times are being responded to with apologetic e-mails explaining that excessive downloads of the "Excessive Indulgences" report are creating traffic tie-ups on the network.