Stiff upper lip? The many porn searches of UK politicos, staff
I am always suspicious that those who want to suppress a certain activity are somehow involved in the activity themselves.
You must draw your own conclusions about the nation whose politicians recently decided it ought to have a porn filter.
For news reaches me that some of those same politicians might be having a hard time filtering porn out of their own lives.
Since May 2012, the servers in the UK Parliament have been straining under the demands of users' titillations.
Searches for porn have been slavishly performed 300,00 times, no doubt under the guise of "research."
This breath-defying statistic came to light after The Huffington Post made a freedom of information request.
Should you imagine that 300,000 people work in the UK Parliament and were all merely experimenting once, I will disappoint you. There are only 5,000 people who might have been responsible for this frenzy.
My rough, rough calculation is that this averages to 800 porn searches a day. That is quite some feeding of the 5,000.
A spokeswoman for the House of Commons told The Huffington Post that no, no, no this didn't mean that every one of these searches was a porn search.
She explained that "a user may access a site that contains optional or automatic links to others, or other 'pop-up' arrangements, which are recorded as requests."
Sometimes one finds arrangements, even if one isn't seeking them.
The height of priapic parliamentarianism occurred in November 2012, when almost 115,000 porn requests were laid bare.
It's hard to know what the government's computer controllers view as "pornographic." The definition is not made public.
Earlier this year, however, it was revealed that a site called "Out of Town Affairs" (you can guess what it's selling) received 52,000 hits from Parliamentary computers.
As John McCain proved earlier this week when he played iPhone poker during the Senate Foreign Relations Committee meeting on Syria, politicians' minds are so sharp that they need to be constantly fed.
I am concerned that should the UK authorities decide to block all pornography on Parliament's gadgets, then troubling decisions will be made, disturbing alliances will be formed, and the nation's so-called special relationship with America will be permanently sullied.
