It’s been almost seven years since several city employees were fired for looking at sexually explicit images while at work. EverythingLubbock.com asked city officials to show us what changes were implemented to prevent it from happening again.
Those firings came just days after a 2011 KAMC News Investigation into web browsing history on City Hall computers.
This time, Assistant City Manager Mark Yearwood said the city is better equipped to manage web browsing, with stronger protections against any explicit or illegal activity.
He said they have implemented a stronger firewall that utilizes a list of banned websites, rather than searching keywords. According to their policy, incidental use of the internet is allowed, but most of the responsibility still falls on supervisors to ensure any casual browsing doesn’t hinder productivity.
EverythingLubbock.com obtained the logs for which websites had been visited the most on City Hall computers. Among those were email, news or business-related sites, as well as social media. Facebook, for instance, had thousands and thousands of clicks. Yearwood said, the numbers don’t always tell the whole story.
“If somebody opens up Facebook in the morning and then they minimize it, never even see it, all day long there is traffic that is getting to your computer,” Yearwood explained. “So if you look it on that base, it looks like somebody is spending all their time on a news site or a Facebook site, when in reality they may have minimized it and just gone on about their business.”
He said, as technology progresses, there are more distractions online than ever. For example, the logs showed more than 2,000 hits to video-streaming sites like Netflix.
“There’s a lot of video that is useful and is permissible,” Yearwood said. “So you really can’t block all video and prevent something like Netflix from coming through.”
Yearwood said it’s up to managers and supervisors to make sure these distractions on the web don’t take away from productivity.
“When the technology is better, eventually somebody is going to find a way to circumvent the rules, but for now, I am very confident in saying we are being proactive, and again, responsibly managing our internet usage.”
