How Not to Explain Away Parliament's Scandalous Internet Habits

The BBC reports that a recently released Freedom of Information request has revealed that "More than 300,000 attempts were made to access pornographic websites at the Houses of Parliament in the past year"

Oops, looks like I forgot to change the font on that quote.  I guess it will just have to remain bolder than the rest of the surrounding text.

This is embarrassing for the government on multiple levels, given David Cameron's campaign to make online pornography harder to access.  Cameron has announced that access to online pornography is "corroding childhood."  The BBC reports here about various efforts the administration has undertaken.  These efforts include requiring internet service providers to filter explicit content, although it is not entirely clear what this measure entails.

The kicker of this story, however, is the explanation a Parliament spokeswoman gave to the press regarding this pornography scandal:

A Commons spokeswoman said: "We do not consider the data to provide an accurate representation of the number of purposeful requests made by network users." 

This was because there was a "variety of ways in which websites can be designed to act, react and interact and due to the potential operation of third party software," she said. 

Some of the hits may have been registered by websites that generate a number of views during a single visit, or those that automatically link to other sites via pop-ups, she explained.

This is comforting to know.  Government officials are not spending their time watching a great deal of porn - their official computers are simply being commandeered by third party software so that it appears that this is what is happening.

And to think I was silly enough to suspect there was a scandal here...