The UK parliament looks like it has a porn habit. According to data released Tuesday, more than 300,000 attempts were made to access porn sites via parliament’s computer network over the course of the last 12 months. Around 5,000 people work within the Houses of Parliament, including just over 1,400 lawmakers across two chambers.
The revelation came after a Freedom of Information request by Huffington Post UK, with the authorities’ data showing some rather erratic interest in the sex sites.
In November last year, for example, 114,844 attempts by parliament workers to access porn sites were blocked, while in February the figure dropped to just 15.
A Commons spokeswoman told the BBC she believed the data failed to provide an accurate representation of the number of “purposeful requests” made by computer users as there is 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.”
The spokeswoman said the stats could have been skewed by sites that generate a number of views for a single visit, or by ones that automatically link to other porn sites via pop-ups.
According to Huffington Post UK, parliamentary officials “refused to reveal exactly what their servers judge as ‘pornographic’ due to ICT security.”
To cut the lawmakers a bit of slack, we can see from the figures that the third busiest month for accessing porn sites from within parliament was in August (26,952), a month when the vast majority are away from London either on vacation or meeting voters in their local area.
The news of parliament’s seemingly excessive porn consumption comes just weeks after the country’s prime minister, David Cameron, announced controversial plans to introduce a scheme that could result in Web users throughout the nation having to choose whether they want to opt in or out of the use of a porn filter. We’re guessing parliament will be exempt.
[Chart: DT / chartgo] [Image: David Milnes / Shutterstock]
