Employee uploads 187,000 explicit images to US Department of Energy network intending to create 'robot porn', gets caught and loses his security clearance, complains he's facing 'the Spanish Inquisition'

A US Department of Energy (DOE) employee has lost his security clearance after uploading *checks notes* 187,000 pornographic images to the DOE network (first reported by 404 Media). The individual's appeal against this has been made public as per DOE guidelines which, while not naming him, says he's "a distinguished professional with decades of experience and significant responsibilities (reflecting the Individual’s role at the DOE site and professional experience)."

The bare facts: On March 23, 2023, this employee backed up his personal porn collection, which consisted of 187,000 images collected over "25-30 years". The individual claimed that due to long-standing issues with "depression" they had been experimenting with generative imaging tools to create what the DOE refers to as "robot pornography": this term refers to AI-generated images featuring 'humans', rather than smut featuring Robocop and the Terminator going at it. The intention with the large-scale upload was to use the images as training data for the AI tools.

Here's the problem (well, one of them). The man uploaded these 187K images to a DOE network, using his DOE-issued computer, and didn't realise he'd done this until DOE investigators came a-knockin' six months down the line.

"The Individual 'thought that even though his personal drives were connected to [the DOE network], they were somehow partitioned, and his personal material would not contaminate his [government computer]," said the DOE report.

Whoops. At this point you just have to admire the chutzpah, because the man's response to the DOE investigation was to complain that he was being snooped on and that an interview about the images was like "the Spanish Inquisition."

One must say that, on this occasion, he should very much have expected the Spanish Inquisition. I mean when you're talking about 187K pornographic images… at some stage you stop becoming an enthusiast and are more akin to a librarian.

There are all sorts of bizarre nuggets in the appeal report. The man claimed the images had originally been moved to his government computer because he'd been viewing them on his phone, but the screen was too small. He also clarified that he'd been maintaining this giant porn stash since the 1990s, and "the sexually explicit images were an accumulation of '25–30 years worth of pornographic material' he had collected on his personal computer."

The man admitted breaching DOE rules but simply "did not think it was 'very wrong' to have adult images on an unclassified computer" and the DOE "was spying on him 'a little too much' given that the systems were unclassified." He also described the DOE software used to investigate the upload as "spyware" before going on to the Spanish Inquisition line.

In mitigation, the man outlined a history of depression, alongside both medical and psychiatric treatment. In 2017 he was diagnosed with "major depressive disorder, moderate, recurrent, in full remission for approximately one year" and "ADHD with problems in focus, attention, follow-through, procrastination, distractibility, and impulsivity."

The judge in the appeal hearing acknowledged this history, but concluded that despite the attempt to "establish a link between his mental health and his conduct [...] I am not convinced that this is the case. The Individual’s self-described symptoms are not obviously directly connected to his conduct, and the Individual’s characterization of his attempts to create generative pornography as a coping mechanism for his symptoms is too attenuated for me to attribute this behavior to his mental health."

They further noted the individual was not aware of what they'd done at the time, and "did not 'think it would actually go in and back up a cloud drive to a cloud because . . . the [sexually explicit] data [was] already on a cloud." Thus "a lack of knowledge on the part of the Individual resulted in the sexually explicit images being saved to the DOE site’s network rather than a lack of fear of consequences."

The individual's clearance was not restored.