Monday, Sep 29, 2008    Text size: 

Burkhardt told the Tampa Tribune in a recent article that he and scores of others were subjected to an investigation of their Internet usage after local officials responded to an anonymous tip that firefighters were accessing pornographic material using county computers.

Burkhardt was intrigued by U.S. Olympian Tyson Gay's efforts at the gold. He also was shopping for home furnishing at Badcock Home Furniture.

The seemingly innocent web surfing using Hillsborough County's Internet access during his downtime at the fire station has forced him to explain his online practices to his family, community and the firefighters' union. "I didn't do anything wrong," Burkhardt said. "It really strained my marriage."

Hillsborough County's Information Technology Director Roger Dean searched the county's computer network files for suspicious file names. Dean discovered nearly 3,000 file names that raised red flags as well as eyebrows.

The resulting list was given to local television station WTSP, which posted it on its website. The list was published alongside an article titled "Firefighters Busted Looking at Porn." The list was removed after a critique of the methods used in the analysis of the investigation.

Other firefighters also were scrutinized. Capt. Doug Shirley, a fire department chaplain who allegedly accessed porn by visiting pictures of a local event called the "Sun 'n Fun Fly-In," said "the whole thing was completely inflammatory."

"You're lumped in with everybody who did do it," he said. "All you can do is say, 'I didn't do this,' and how this can occur, and you're wondering if they think, 'He doth protest too much.'"

Institutions often deploy web filters to screen for adult content. The filters, however, have often produced questionable and sometimes puzzling results.

"It's impossible to tell whether the firefighters were looking at truly pornographic sites without looking at the logs of the sites they accessed," PeaceFire.org's Bennett Haselton told XBIZ.

"Just because a program blocks something as pornographic, that emphatically does not mean that it actually is pornographic," Haselton added. FortiNet, a popular web-filtering program has labeled seemingly innocuous sites as pornographic. Blocked sites include the Brooklyn-based church Dabar Worship Center, the Lebanese Physical Handicapped Union and the Seattle Women's Jazz Orchestra.

As of publication, Hillsborough County officials continue to investigate the claims of adult content on county computers.