Op-Ed Critiques Bill That Targets Porn Watching by Fed Workers

LOS ANGELES—An opinion piece by Kevin R. Kosar was published on TheHill.com yesterday that questions the wisdom of passing a federal law that outlaws watching porn on the job by employees of the federal government. “Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) has introduced legislation to prohibit federal employees from accessing pornographic websites on their computers,” wrote Kosar. “As reported by The Washington Post, this legislation was prompted after the Environmental Protection Agency’s inspector general discovered a senior employee had downloaded 7,000 smut files on his work computer, and spent many work hours eyeballing the website ‘Sadism Is Beautiful.’” The text of the bill, H.R. 5628, short-titled “Eliminating Pornography from Agencies Act,” is simple enough; perhaps too simple. (a) Prohibition.--Except as provided in subsection (b), not later than 90 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget shall issue guidelines that prohibit the access of a pornographic or other explicit web site from a Federal computer. (b) Exception.--The prohibition described in subsection (a) shall not apply to any Federal computer that is used for an investigative purpose that requires accessing a pornographic web site. Unimpressed with the effort, Kosar notes, “Obviously, it is not appropriate for a government employee to shirk his official duties and spend the day watching kink online. But the question remains: will enacting a new law make a difference? Probably not.” His reason for being so doubtful is also simple. “How exactly is an agency supposed to prevent an employee from viewing porn on the job?” he asks. “That is what H.R. 5628 ultimately intends.” Indeed, it is the very overreach of the proposed law that makes its success so unlikely, argues Kosar. “H.R. 5628 would require the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to issue rules against watching porn, which agencies then would have to spend time comparing with their current rules,” he writes. “This sounds sensible, but in practice, it likely will devolve into an exercise in bureaucratic busy work.” A better approach, he adds, would be to hold bureaucracies accountable by making them “report back promptly on the steps its information technology folks have taken to block access to smut sites. Congress could then post this information online, and invite the public to comment. Who knows, maybe a techie out there can recommend better filtering software to the EPA.” That would be a dubious approach as well, but at least it would be less publicly intrusive and resource-gobbling than “putting another law on the books [that] will not fix the problem.” As AVN reported last month, this is not the first toothless attempt to legislate Washington's porn-watching proclivities.