Gross misuse

Can things get much worse at the Virginia Department of Transportation? Within the past year, the state’s road building agency has been brow beaten by both political parties, the top executives have been replaced and the departments transportation priority list was dismissed by the new governor as “fiction.”

Reform is under way at VDOT with new leaders and lower expectations. Now this. Close to 90 workers at VDOT have either been fired or suspended for spending too much time on the Internet. Many cases include employees browsing the Web for more than two hours during the work day, viewing sites that are … err… not related to transportation.

Sixty-one workers were suspended for two weeks for inappropriate use of their office computers. Fifteen were fired, according to VDOT officials, for viewing porn sites while on the job. Two others resigned for similar reasons.

In a separate investigation, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, four Sate Corporation Commission employees resigned and another was reprimanded for abusing the agency’s e-mail system.

Around 8,000 of VDOT’s more than 10,000 employees have some type of Internet access at work.

In this information age, you can find almost anything on the Internet. Some things are educational and fascinating while other things are extremely offensive. In fact, the latter is one of the few sectors of Internet commerce that routinely posts large profits.

While it’s easy to cruise the Information Superhighway, it’s just as easy to track someone’s steps along the way. When law enforcement authorities investigate a crime, one of the first things taken during a home search is the computer.

Perhaps Internet access, in addition to e-mail, is vital to the state transportation department’s mission. But the fact that employees were browsing the Web on the taxpayers’ dime, is down right disrespectful. Maybe some of the employees had too much time on their hands. It’s even worse considering the mismanagement and budget overruns associated with VDOT over the past five years.

The problems at VDOT and the SCC are probably not much different from problems at other government agencies or the private sector. But it doesn’t justify what was aptly described by one official as “gross misuses” of the Internet.

Let this be a warning too all others. Computer privacy should be respected when private computers are used. Public computers, however, have no such protections.