News has traveled quickly after hearing that some SEC employees were viewing porn sites during the 2008 financial crises instead of focusing on their job duties.

Employees have admitted to viewing porn at work for over a year and viewing porn on SEC-issues laptops while outside of the office. One of the staff accountants was extremely persistent and tried 16,000 times in one month to access porn sites and filled his work hard drive with inappropriate images. And, a senior attorney admitted to sometimes spending eight hours per day searching for porn.  (See the article by MarketWatch)

Here’s a dose of reality. The people in the news lately could have very easily been you or me. It’s easy to say “I’d never do that”, but, the truth of the matter is that you never know what might happen. With all the inappropriate sites out there today, it is so easy to accidentally stumble upon one by mistake.  Maybe you type in the URL wrong, or innocently click a link in your search engine and it bring up a bad site. Then, that image stays in your mind and you keep thinking about it until your curiosity gets to you so you tinker a little bit. Then, before you know it, you’ve fallen into that slippery slope.

We are all tempted in different areas of life. And, because we are human, we are not perfect. Therefore, we need to place hedges around us to help us fight off those temptations. I’d like to challenge you to get an accountability party that you can talk to on a regular basis to help you through whatever struggles you are facing. Secondly, I’d like to challenge you to be proactive in placing a hedge of protection around your virtual world by installing a trusted Internet filter. Just as you wouldn’t live in a home with no locks on the doors to protect yourself from physical harm, don’t let you and your family live unprotected from inappropriate sites on the Internet that could harm you or your family’s mind.