It wouldn’t be a misleading name for the SEC. I didn’t get to read the details of the porn story Friday. If you haven’t, you’re missing how bad it was. From the Daily News account Derb linked to:
– A senior attorney at the SEC’s Washington headquarters spent up to eight hours a day looking at and downloading pornography. When his government computer ran out of hard drive space, he burned the files to CDs or DVDs. He later agreed to resign.
– An accountant was blocked more than 16,000 times in a single month from visiting “sex” or “pornography” sites, but still managed to amass a collection of “very graphic” material by using Google to bypass the SEC’s internal filter. He wound up with a 2-week suspension.
– Seventeen of the randy employees were “at a senior level” earning salaries of up to $222,418.
– The number of cases jumped from two in 2007 to 16 in 2008. The cracks in the financial system emerged in mid-2007 and spread into full-blown panic by the fall of 2008.
All kinds of bad moral conduct coalesced around the financial mess. But the real story here is that the problem is not remotely unique to the SEC.