I received my first information gathering meeting today since the thumb drive debacle started last Tuesday. There are several updates here that are worth sharing here.
I got into the office with my boss and the division head. They sat on both sides of a long table leaving the head for me. Things were amicable and light when the discussion starts. I was told this is not a counseling session, but an information gathering session. Evidently there are very large implications about conducting a counseling session. I’m sure I will learn more about those specifics in the near future.
As soon as we move through this phase of the meeting I learn interesting fact #1:
Rottentomatoes.com is porn
My supervisor then brought out a stack of ~6-7 pages and starts asking me of my internet usage habits. I give him my list of daily websites I go to when workflow is low in particular tsptalk.com and digg.com. that answer didnt satisfy what he was looking for so he queried further and asked directly if I had ever used my government computer to view pornography either intentionally or accidentally. Of course the answer was a resounding NO! If I had thought about it at the time, the OJ Simpson response would have been better suited–I am 100% sure that I have never viewed pornography on my government computer.
At this point he begins to flip through the pack of papers and ask about different websites–specifically
Rottentomatoes and
The Progressive.
Go ahead and give the sites a look Ill wait. I explain that Rottentomatoes is a movie review site that I use if we are planning on seeing a movie and that The Progressive is a moderate political discussion website. He nods and then comments that its odd then that both of those websites were earmarked for having sexually explicit content.
Needless to say I was a bit shocked. I reemphasized my position on what content was on those websites and the both of them wrote feverishly each and every word I spoke. Supposedly my “porn” surfing was what flagged my user account for closer inspection. Then we moved onto interesting fact #2:
I am an above average computer user
After my account was flagged, the IT
professionals did a system scan to see if there were any other variances with my computer. This is the point where they discovered my personal thumb drive on the computer. After some skilled analysis from the IT
professional, that is clicking into the mysterious thumb drive folder, he discovered that I had
PortableApps installed on my thumb drive. Now according to the IT
professional, PortableApps would enable me to create vulnerability holes in the network that could be accessible to hackers**. At this point, the IT
professional deems that I am more than computer savvy than the average user as well as a potential network threat and escalates the issue up his chain of command.
At any rate, I promptly corrected them both and pointed out that all the PortableApp tools were indeed workflow tools and not some mysterious hacker tools. I explained that since I was not authorized a laptop with my job, PortableApps ensured that I had the capability to perform my work tasks as required where ever I was at. Im not sure how well this rationale went over, but since it was the truth I left it at that. Which leads me to my final interesting fact #3:
I am superhuman
That right. Not only do I wear the distinction of being an “above average computer user”, I also have the capability of viewing the exact same website 20 times in 1 second. Towards the middle of this conversation I am offered the pack of papers with all of my “porn” violations on it. This list was a very crude printout that listed the time of viewing the website, my IP number, the site’s IP number, and the sexually explicit content message. It had all the tells of being a printout of a quick 5 second SQL output.
I examined it briefly and notice something very interesting–it had me viewing the pornography filled Rottentomatoes.com 20 times in the same second. That is, there were 20 lines of printout that had me looking at a website that all shared the
exact timestamp down to the second. This pattern happened through the 6-7 page printout.
(Being the geek that I am, I counted all the duplications on the first 2 pages and noticed that they were all in even multiples. Interesting. If this was my own query, I would have to double check the query linkages to make sure that there wasnt any double-counting situations. But since the potential source of this error was in my favor, I kept it to myself.)
Conclusion
The meeting was left with what I should expect as this issue continues to get worked:
- I need to be available for another conversation this week with my senior rater. This issue has gone up my chain of command to literally 2 or 3 steps below the President. He needs reassurance that he doesnt have a pornographer in his organization. So Im sure that Ill get to recount this whole situation again.
- There will be plenty of remedial training required to get back to fully operational. Evidently being marked an above average computer user doesnt preclude me from this training. So Ill get to sit through the indoctrination sessions one more time.
- I may have a computer to work with come next Monday. no guarantees that email and internet will be up however. This isnt as bad as it seems as this week I am away from my desk doing training primarily.
- They can not guarantee that I will have a job once this process is completed. I cant tell if this is a valid outcome or if its just a threat to let me know how serious my actions were. Either way it should do wonders for my sleep at night.
More to follow as I endure it…
**
This is completely wrong. If anyone can bring down a multi-tiered network using Open Office, please let me know.
you have to call a 800# to do anything
or have any computer,radio,or telephone issues resolved. Yesterday our dispatch system was down, we had a local I.T. person....but wait we need a Ticket# first before we do anything! yea team!
