Oh dear. Government employees in New Zealand have been caught trying to visit naughty websites and no I am not talking about Porn sites although they have been caught trying to do that too.
Apparently what they have been doing is so much worse than porn. They have been trying to read content on Alt-right websites! ( oh and “supremacist sites”). I have never even heard of such sites in New Zealand let alone tried to find them. Why on earth would government employees be going on a supremacist goose chase?
What is really interesting are the excuses being rolled out in an attempt to excuse the behaviour.
Treasury officials have pointed to pop-ups as the likely reason why some of its employees were blocked from looking at a number of alt-right and supremacist websites amid more than a million searches stopped by its systems between October 2018 and August 2019.
The issue was revealed in response to an Official Information Act request by MediaWorks, which also confirmed staff at the Department of Conservation had been blocked from accessing pornography sites 148 times since the end of January.
A Treasury spokesman said it would be wrong to assume all blocked attempts were from people deliberately trying to access the websites.
No doubt they all were searching for a nutritious breakfast cereal and thanks to predictive text a KKK website popped up. It could happen to anyone.
[…] Robertson on Tuesday told reporters that, along with the pop-up issue, it was also possible staff had also been looking at the sites as part of their work after the Christchurch mosque shootings.
“What I’ll be seeking that it’s understood that, if in the normal course of events, people have to be looking at these sites they’ll be talking to their manager about that.”
A Newspaper
Is this confirmation that government employees are being paid to spy on people? It certainly sounds like it.