Officials catching Web porn viewers

Government workers who access illicit Web sites on the job are being punished - some more than others.

By SHARON TUBBS

© St. Petersburg Times, published August 13, 2000

Bill Horne's voice is low and uneven. All day long Clearwater's interim city manager has tried to avoid this moment.

Yes, he has the list of names a reporter requested. Most aren't recognizable to the general public: a summer intern, a guy in the finance department and two men who don't even work for the city anymore. The fifth, though, is a heavy hitter in City Hall.

Over the past four years, they were caught looking at adult Web sites on the Internet at work. But they did it just once, Horne said, so he's reluctant to release their identities.

"I do have a lot of sensitivity to how this is portrayed in the media," Horne says. These men, he says, are "good employees."

Horne is one of a number of officials in the Tampa Bay area -- and across the nation forced to deal with the same touchy question:

With the Internet's growing prevalence, how should government agencies discipline employees caught using their office computers to eyeball naked and scantly clad women?

Several employees in the White House were reprimanded and one was suspended without pay last year for downloading pornography from the Internet, a White House spokesman confirmed last week. Closer to home, supervisors in St. Petersburg and Citrus County have reacted swiftly, delivering pink slips or unpaid suspensions, while higher-ups in Clearwater have taken a more genteel approach.

"It's very informal," Horne said of the process in his city. "We have had no basis to be punitive with our people."

At the state and municipal levels, even within the law enforcement community, government employees including department heads have been caught peeking at porn while working at public expense.

"I know we've had some cases," said Hillsborough Deputy County Administrator Pat Bean. She didn't know, however, how many employees had been disciplined. "There could be a whole bunch," she said. "There could be two or three in every department that I don't know about."

Besides Hillsborough, governments in Citrus, Hernando, Pasco and Pinellas forbid workers from using the Internet for anything but business. Some supervisors concede they turn their heads when employees violate the policies by shopping or checking their stocks on line. But they draw the line at adult entertainment. "Personally, I consider it more serious," said St. Petersburg auditor Steven Smith, whose office periodically reviews employee computer records for pornographic activity.

Most abusers are men. So women could become uncomfortable if they spot risque pictures on a co-worker's computer screen.

"Any company that has a hostile work environment has to be concerned about litigation," Smith said.

Private companies nationwide are grappling with the same problem. For instance, Compaq Computer Corp. fired 20 employees after bosses learned they had accessed sexually explicit Web sites, a March Dallas Morning News article said. And the New York Times Co. fired 23 employees in a central processing center in Norfolk, Va., for distributing pornographic images via e-mail, a December New York Times article said.

But when employees paid by tax dollars start looking at porn in the office, the stakes are higher, government officials say.

"They hold positions of public trust," said Pinellas County Sheriff Everett Rice, who dealt with his first porn viewer this year. "We don't expect them to be misusing public resources."

St. Petersburg Mayor David Fischer felt much the same. "The fact that we are a government, we are in a fishbowl category," Fischer said.

In the past year and a half, at least four St. Petersburg employees were disciplined for using city computers to look at porn. Two of them, security guards, were fired. A security supervisor with an "exemplary" work history was suspended for 30 days without pay, personnel records show.

The fourth was Joseph Arenas, the manager of energy and technology and a city employee for 23 years.

When asked what happened, the 65-year-old expressed remorse. "I had access to the Internet and started to explore it," Arenas said, adding he did it out of curiosity.

"It was a weak moment and I fell into it," he said.

Arenas periodically looked at sites over three months before stopping in December, he said.

"I did it for a while and I realized how sinful it was," he said. "The Lord gave me the grace to stop and I stopped."

Smith's audit department uncovered Arenas' former activity, and days before he was set to retire, city bosses confronted Arenas. A scathing reprimand was placed in his file.

"This violation of the city policy is a serious offense and were it not for your imminent retirement, you would be subject to severe discipline up to and including termination," City Administrator Tish Elston wrote on March 29.

Arenas retired from his $61,000-a-year job two days later, city records show.

He didn't realize the city could track his Internet activities, especially those from months gone by. With all the technology and computer know-how available today, though, it wasn't difficult.

"We actually track everything," said Muslim Gadiwalla, the city's chief information officer. St. Petersburg has a special computer server that logs every Web site accessed by employees. Smith's audit department then reviews reports detailing Internet activity.

Employees also have been caught by co-workers who glimpsed pornographic pictures on a computer screen. The co-worker told the boss, who told the computer department, which gathered evidence.

That's what happened in Citrus County, where an 11-year employee had been granted Internet access just a few hours before a co-worker caught him. He was forced to resign in May, said Dwight Small, director of the county's human resources department.

Then there's the case of Pinellas County Sheriff's Sgt. David McKenzie. On several days in May, McKenzie looked at pornographic Web sites on his office computer in Dunedin, records revealed. One day, he inadvertently printed a photo sheet with thumbnail pictures of women engaged in sexual acts. A shocked female co-worker watched as the printout scrolled from the office printer, followed later by the naughty tale "Crystal's Fantasy."

Sheriff's investigators reviewed the matter, interviewing workers with a court reporter on hand to take sworn statements. Women in the office were asked if they were offended by the material, if McKenzie had apologized to them and if they felt sheriff's officials handled the matter properly.

When interviewing McKenzie, an investigator pulled out the thumbnails. Presenting it to McKenzie like a lawyer setting up the accused at trial, the investigator said, "Let me show this to you and see if you're familiar with this."

McKenzie answered, "Yes."

He was suspended for two days without pay.

In Tallahassee, an intense investigation began when someone sent out a pornographic e-mail to state employees under Russell Nelson's name. Nelson, then director of the Division of Marine Fisheries, hadn't sent the e-mail.

But in the course of the investigation, officials discovered he had visited porn sites while at work. Nelson admitted this when questioned, said James T. Knight III, inspector general for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission.

"If he was bored or under stress, he would surf for a couple hours," Knight said.

Nelson resigned last month under duress.

"The fact that Dr. Nelson was the head of the division, that was certainly a first," said Henry Cabbage, public information director for the commission.

In Clearwater, special computer software flags an array of inappropriate sites, even venues such as CNN, and computer network specialists alert supervisors when a site containing adult content is accessed.

In June 1999, a computer specialist noticed that a computer in City Hall had been used to peruse adult Web sites.

Word got to Horne, now the interim city manager, and he approached the guilty party. It was Bob Keller, Clearwater's assistant city manager of economic development.

Keller said he was embarrassed throughout the five-minute conversation as Horne told him the sites were against policy. "Yeah, I felt awkward," Keller said.

But there was nothing lewd about what he did, Keller said. The sites may have contained adult content, but were not pornographic, he explained.

"What I logged onto was a commercial site where you could buy sexy lingerie and clothing," Keller told the Times. "So it was not pornography, but it comes up as (an inappropriate) site."

Keller said he was buying the lingerie for his wife and shopped a few different sites. He knew of Clearwater's Internet policy, but, at the time, did not think he was doing anything wrong.

"Where I made a mistake was not associating what I was doing with something that was objectionable," Keller said. "Frankly, it just didn't occur to me."

Keller, like others approached about accessing inappropriate sites, was warned not to do it again, Horne said. In most cases, supervisors made no written record of the verbal reprimands, and nothing was put in the employees' personnel files.

"In our case, the individuals heeded the warning and that was the end of it," Horne said.

Clearwater treats Internet porn violations the same as many other violations, he said. Officials have no rigid plan of discipline; instead employees are punished based on the manager's discretion, which takes into account a number of factors. One is whether it's a first-time offense.

Employees make mistakes, Horne said. "They may not remember what the policies are or whatever."

- Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

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