MINISTRY OF PORN

The government fired 19 civil servants and disciplined more than 200 in a crackdown on viewing Internet porn at work. Staff at the Department of Work and Pensions had accessed two million pages of Web porn and one employee alone accessed 103,000 hardcore images.

The crackdown is believed to be the biggest of its kind by a government agency on employees' web-surfing habits. "The DWP takes the misuse of its IT systems very seriously," a DWP spokeswoman said. "We regularly scan the computers to determine the presence of offensive or inappropriate material. Disciplinary action has been taken and it may lead to criminal prosecution."

The move came after a probe into employees' usage of computers and the ministry's data network between July 1, 2003 and March 31, 2004, the DWP spokeswoman said. If child pornography is found, police are called, she added. The DWP spokeswoman said the ministry has firewall software installed on PCs, but she could not explain how it may have been circumvented to access the sites. "The Internet, being as huge as it is, things do get through," she added.

The DWP statement said that in most cases where monitoring showed up porn, further investigation demonstrated staff had "innocently followed a link from another site". Steve Webb, pensions spokesman for the opposition Liberal Democrats party, called for immediate dismissal of any civil servant accessing porn sites at work. "There has to be a zero tolerance approach," he said.