Watching porn at work is a federal government tradition. Federal employees from agencies like the EPA, SEC, and FCC have been caught watching porn enough times, a Congressional rep actually thought a new law was needed to stop it. The bill was redundant. All federal agencies forbid the use of work computers to watch porn but that hasn't stopped these stories from surfacing with disturbing frequency.

At a certain point, porn-watching at work endangers a person's job. At other points before that, it endangers the employer itself. Zack Whittaker of TechCrunch dug up a Dept. of the Interior Inspector General's report [PDF] indicating a porn-watching employee inadvertently tried to the take the agency down from the inside.

A U.S. government network was infected with malware thanks to one employee’s “extensive history” of watching porn on his work computer, investigators have found.

The audit, carried out by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s inspector general, found that a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) network at the EROS Center, a satellite imaging facility in South Dakota, was infected after an unnamed employee visited thousands of porn pages that contained malware, which downloaded to his laptop and “exploited the USGS’ network.” Investigators found that many of the porn images were “subsequently saved to an unauthorized USB device and personal Android cell phone,” which was connected to the employee’s government-issued computer.

The official version -- with redactions -- provides a few more details. Loooooots of porn-watching going on here:

We found that [redacted] knowingly used U.S. Government computer systems to access unauthorized internet web pages. We also found that those unauthorized pages hosted malware. The malware was downloaded to [redacted's] Government laptop, which then exploited the USGS ' network. Our digital forensic examination revealed that- had an extensive history of visiting adult pornography websites. Many of the 9,000 web pages [redacted] visited routed through websites that originated in Russia and contained malware. Our analysis confirmed that many of the pornographic images were subsequently saved to an unauthorized USB device and personal Android cell phone connected to [redacted's] Government-issued computer. We found that [redacted's] personal cell phone was also infected with malware.

Like everywhere else this has happened, the DOI expressly forbids the use of work computers for porn viewing. It also makes employees sign a form stating that they understand what's forbidden and what can happen to them if they violate these policies. It's apparently not much of a deterrent. The report doesn't say what happened to [redacted] -- only that this employee admitted they were familiar with the policies they violated.

DOI also forbids connecting personal devices to work computers. That policy isn't being enforced either, apparently. If the DOI isn't actively monitoring work computers for these two violations, it really can't lay all the blame for the malware infection on its unofficial porn hub. Proactive measures are far more useful than post-infection policy patches.

By now, most people are aware that Facebook advertisements can be quite targeted in nature, whether by age, gender, or location. Most people also are aware of the level of spending by politicians and government for Facebook ads to get their messages out to their targeted audience. But just how targeted can Facebook ads be in the service of politicians? Well, for that we turn to the story of Lisa Murkowski, Senator from Alaska, and her attempt to get a road built between two towns in her state.

Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski has been trying for years to convince the Interior Department to allow Alaska to build a 11-mile road through a wildlife refuge to make two remote towns in the state more easily accessible. But the Interior Department has balked, citing environmental concerns; the area is a habitat for migratory birds. In order to convince Department officials to change their minds, Murkowski recently targeted them—and only them—with a video ad on Facebook.

How did she do this? Well, she produced a video advertisement and bought ads on Facebook that were set to run specifically during lunchtime hours and geo-targeted 1849 C Street, N.W. in Washington D.C.. That address is the building for the Interior Department. That's fairly precise targeting, I think, which is why it's actually quite impressive that the advertisement appeared in the newsfeeds seven-thousand times as it ran and the video had been clicked on well over two-thousand times. But exactly how precise was the geo-location portion of this advertisement?

Well, it depends on how big the building is. A spokesperson from Facebook directed me to a help page explaining how to target people in a specific location (which it can determine from GPS coordinates off their smartphone or, less reliably, from the IP address of their computer). The most granular option is targeting a location with a radius of one kilometer, or a little over half a mile.

So if you were targeting a workplace with a one-mile long campus, like Facebook itself, you could be guaranteed to show an ad only to people in its buildings. But the Department of Interior takes up just one city block. So when Murkowski targeted the Interior Department’s address, she was actually targeting not just that building, but all the people and buildings in a half-mile radius.

Which probably led to some very confused people in nearby buildings wondering what the hell this video about a road in Alaska was doing in their newsfeed. This does come off as perhaps a tad unseemly, but I view this kind of targeted advertising less negatively than I do traditional lobbying efforts. And it's not exactly clear whether all of those views had any real effect on the policy-makers, as the Interior Department still opposes the building of the road as of the date of this writing.

Still, it's a brave new world out there for anyone looking to influence policy-makers.

Eric Goldman alerts us to the interesting bit of news that Google has sued the US government -- specifically the Department of the Interior, for not seriously considering Google Apps when it put out a Request for Quotation (RFQ) to handle its messaging needs. Specifically, the DOI stated upfront in the RFQ that the solution had to be part of the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite. Google is making the argument that this is "unduly restrictive of competition," and it seems like they've got a decent argument there.

Most of the lawsuit details the history of meetings and conversations between Google and the DOI, where Google sought to convince the DOI that its solution was acceptable. The DOI justified limiting its offerings to Microsoft, by saying that Microsoft had two things that other solution providers did not: unified/consolidated email and "enhanced security." Google disputes this (not surprisingly) and notes various problems with Microsoft solutions -- including well reported downtime issues. Google protested the RFQ when it was released, but the GAO dismissed Google's protest saying that since Google does not have a GSA schedule contract (i.e., what you need to sell to the gov't), it was "not an interested party." Anyway, should make for an interesting lawsuit if it goes anywhere...