Police culture: Workplace porn

If you ask Chris Budge, the police are no worse - and may even be a lot better - than any other organisation when it comes to looking at porn at work.

Budge should know. The computer forensic consultant runs eCrime, a company called in by businesses to audit their computers for offensive and objectionable material or to check them out for fraud.

A third of the computers checked will show some sort of pornographic activity, says Budge, from a single email joke to scores of hard-core sex images downloaded from the internet.

"The worst case we had was about 55 per cent [of computers] in a workplace."

He has seen it all too. Only this week he received a computer to be checked for fraud and "every third image is a horse doing something to somebody".

He says the numbers given out by the police this week are less than what he would usually come across in a workplace.

During audits his staff check for objectionable [illegal] material, which is reported to the Department of Internal Affairs, age restricted material and other material which may be inappropriate or offensive.

Material range from "bikini images" as seen in top-shelf calendars showing the side of a breast but no nipple, through to images showing genitals and sexual acts.

"When I do an audit in the workplace the first thing they [the company] want to know is how many Category 5 [objectionable] there are. Then they want to know Category 4 [hard-core] and then they start to breathe easy."

The company then has to decide what to do after the audit, but this is fraught because it is very difficult to prove a particular person was responsible, even if it was under that person's log-on "because I don't know who's fingerprint was on the keyboard at that time".

Businesses also need to be careful about how they write their policies, says Budge.

Some policies cover emails but not the internet, or vice versa, and others only cover objectionable material which restricts sanctions only to illegal material, leaving out activity others might find offensive.

Anecdotally, numbers of employees getting sacked or disciplined for looking at porn is on the rise, but it is difficult to get numbers.

Phillipa Muir, an employment law specialist with Simpson Grierson in Auckland, says there are few cases of employees challenging being sacked because more and more employers have clear internet and email policies in place.

"There are not really that many cases [in the courts].

"I'm sure there have been lots more but employees don't have a leg to stand on."

Challenges are made when a company has not had a clear policy in place, which says if an employee breaks the rules they can be sacked.

Employers are also getting better at tracking and preventing porn in the workplace.

Larger companies have sophisticated systems which monitor usage and software is available which prevents it from getting through by searching for a particular word or image and blocking it.

David Lowe, from the Employers and Manufacturers Association, says workplaces are becoming far less tolerant and are far less likely to "turn a blind eye".

Internet Safety Group director Liz Butterfield applauds the police audit and says no kind of pornography is acceptable in the workplace.

She says it is hard to know how big the problem is, because some workplaces sweep it under the carpet.

Then there was the case of Justice Robert Fisher, who accessed sex websites on his work computer, but who was not sacked despite the Corrections Department having a clear policy.

"I think this is an interesting opportunity to talk about the issue not just of employees' behaviour but the tendency of a lot of people to act in ways with these technologies they wouldn't normally. We call it disinhibition."

She warned companies to grapple with the issue now because pornography is getting ever easier to access. Soon mobile telephones will have porn providers and people won't have to go online for it.