LONDON—While workers watching porn on the job may not be something employers are happy about, recent surveys show that the practice is so common that it should probably be considered perfectly normal. One recent survey found two out three men and more than one of every three women acknowledging that they use at least some of their time on the clock to enjoy online adult entertainment.
But when the employee is a leading member of the British Prime Minister’s cabinet, the situation can be a bit more difficult, as 61-year-old Conservative Party Member of Parliament Damian Green is now finding out, in a scandal that has been riveting British politics-watchers for the past month.
Green serves as First Secretary of State in the cabinet of Prime Minister Theresa May, making him effectively the second-highest ranking member of the current British government. But in 2008, he was arrested over allegedly receiving leaked documents. Due to a lack of evidence, however, no charges were brought against him.
Now, nine years later, one cop involved with a raid on Green says that they found something else on Green’s computer at that time—pornography. According to the BBC, police found “thousands” of porn images saved on Green’s work computer.
But what were those images? Initially, frenzied reports in the British press described the porn as “grotesque” and “extreme.” The BBC, however, later reported that the images were not extreme, nor was anything about any of them considered illegal.
Green, for his part, denied that that he had ever viewed porn on his government computer, calling the allegations “completely untrue” and ”political smears.” And on Monday of this week, reports surfaced in the British press that Green now says he can prove that someone else downloaded the images on to his computer.
Green told police that he now has evidence that other parliamentary computers contain porn, but that the images have never been viewed or accessed in any way by the Members of Parliament who use those computers.
Another Conservative Party politician, Nadine Dorries, backed Green up, admitting over the weekend that she has shared her private computer passwords with members of her staff, even allowing lowly interns to access her computer unsupervised—a shocking confession that has security implications going well beyond the possible downloading of porn.
“Imagine that, instead of perusing some nudes, the First Secretary of State (i.e. Green) was instead accused of using his computer to leak classified intelligence data to Russian agents,” wrote tech journalist Adam Shepherd on the site IT Pro. “With a single shared login, it's virtually impossible to trace the source of the leak back to the mole.”
Green is now under pressure to resign from the British government over legal porn images supposedly found on his work computer nine years ago. Green is resisting that pressure, but the “scandal” over his alleged workplace porn-watching continues to make headlines.
