A senior government security officer working for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was discovered using her work days for just about anything other than government work. A 32-page misconduct report outlined all of the sordid details, including the four years she spent bilking the government and the more than one year it took supervisors to address it. So, what was this GS-14 supporting the CIA doing at work?
For one, she was moonlighting as a contract facility security officer, making use of government resources to advise, and take money from fourteen different companies.
For two, she spent a lot of time tooling around on the government’s repository of security clearance background check data, the Joint Personnel Adjudication System, or JPAS. What was she looking for? Besides the data to support her 14 side businesses, she spent a lot of time looking up Edward Snowden. She ran 357 searches of Edward Snowden…and 442 on herself. It’s hard to say why she would be compelled to look up Snowden more than 300 times. Her own searches were likely due to narcissism, and probably a very real concern that someone may have discovered her abuse of the system, and flagged her own file.
Finally, when she wasn’t researching Edward Snowden or herself, or moonlighting, she made time for other activities critical to her government position. Just joking – she spent the rest of her time on Facebook and engaging in cybersex at the office. When interviewed, the security officer admitted to spending ‘all day’ on Facebook, and scheduling time on gaming sites for an additional four to six hours. This went on for four years. She also engaged in cybersex with a government contractor – but was pretty adamant that was only one year of her employment.
The moral of this story? Remember that when you click that little ‘consent to monitoring’ button every time you log into a government computer, it’s true. It may take them four years to do it, but the government can eventually come back and discover, line by line, search by search, every little piece of digital dirt you left lying around the office.
