Jul 31, 2013

SSA Employee Sentenced To Five Years In Prison

     From the Seattle Post Intelligencer:
A former Social Security Administration worker caught on camera masturbating to child pornography while on the clock has been sentenced to five years in prison.
Caught with a staggering 3,772 photos and videos showing children being sexually assaulted, Thomas Barrett Jr. was investigated after his Internet trolling for child porn brought a computer virus onto a Social Security network.
Investigators found Barrett, 50, had been searching for child porn on his work computer in November and set up a camera watching his work station, located at the Social Security Administration’s Seattle office.
Shortly thereafter, Barrett was recorded fondling himself while viewing photos of a man sexually assaulting a young girl. Prosecutors noted Barrett appeared to bounce between the child porn and his actual work in an apparent effort to hide the rape photos from his coworkers.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

It baffles me how he was able to search for anything like child porn on SSA computers, when you can't even access Facebook or several other commonly-used websites due to SSA security blocks. It is very common to be booted out of even news items due to the security settings. Anyway, glad he was caught and good riddance.

Anonymous said...

I'm with you--unless he somehow installed some proxy-related program or something. But then, how did he install an .exe? I just imagine trying to do something like this from my SSA work computer and find it impossible.

Anonymous said...

Barrett worked as a case technician in Seattle's ODAR. Where was his supervisor while this was going on.
http://www.ice.gov/news/releases/1301/130109seattle2.htm

Anonymous said...

As soon as the files came up in the regularly scheduled suspcious file search automation it was refered to OIG. It appears this was acted upon in a brief period.