“Distinguished” US Government Employee With Access To Nuclear Secrets Busted In ‘Robot Porn’ Scheme

In what can only be described as a spectacularly ill-advised IT decision, a Department of Energy (DOE) employee with access to nuclear secrets has lost his security clearance after uploading a staggering 187,000 pornographic images to the agency’s network, according to 404 Media.

Yes, you read that correctly – 187,000. And before you go straight to ‘planted porn’ (we did too) – the porn aficionado admitted to it. 

This “distinguished professional” (this is how the DOE described him) with decades of experience apparently decided that March 23, 2023 was the perfect day to back up his 30-year personal collection of explicit content onto a DOE computer. One can only imagine the IT department’s reaction upon discovery. The employee remained blissfully unaware of his colossal mistake for six months until officials showed up for what must have been an extraordinarily awkward conversation.

PC Gamer has more details:

The man admitted breaching DOE rules but simply “did not think it was ‘very wrong’ to have adult images on an unclassified computer” and the DOE “was spying on him ‘a little too much’ given that the systems were unclassified.” He also described the DOE software used to investigate the upload as “spyware” before going on to the Spanish Inquisition line.

In mitigation, the man outlined a history of depression, alongside both medical and psychiatric treatment. In 2017 he was diagnosed with “major depressive disorder, moderate, recurrent, in full remission for approximately one year” and “ADHD with problems in focus, attention, follow-through, procrastination, distractibility, and impulsivity.”

According to his appeal, which was helpfully made public thanks to DOE guidelines, the employee insisted he thought his personal drives were “partitioned” from the DOE network, keeping his extensive collection private. Spoiler alert: they weren’t. He attributed the upload to experiments with AI-generated “robot pornography,” clarifying these were images of humans for AI training, not mechanical fantasies, while coping with depression.

According to a filing, “The Individual was using his personal cellphone to view the generative images, but he wanted to view larger images, so he viewed the images using his government-issued computer,” adding “He also reported that, since the 1990s, he had maintained a “giant compressed file with several directories of pornographic images,” which he moved to his personal cloud storage drive so he could use them to make generative images.”

So this guy not only had a massive porn collection he’d been accumulating since the 1990s, he wanted to feed them into an AI to make more.

The judge in the appeal wasn’t buying it, dryly noting: “The Individual’s attempt to link his generative pornography to mental health is too attenuated.” The ruling concluded the upload resulted from “a lack of knowledge” rather than malicious intent, which is probably the kindest possible interpretation.

Read the full report on the appeal here.

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