The naked civil servant – online Down Under

Red-faced politicians in Australia will have to sort out their own back yard before preaching to the rest of the country against accessing adult material on the Net. For Net users working within the Aussie government bearing .gov.au domains have been indulging in cybersex right under the noses of their prim politicians. Earlier this week do-goody Aussie politicians voted to outlaw sexually explicit and violent content on the Net. But the down-under owner of a US-based porn site has written to a top Aussie minister telling him that government proxy servers and domains are being used to access her hardcore site. Explicit Bernadette.net has a member's only area featuring Webcams displaying some seriously saucy stuff -- exactly the kind of hardcore smut Aussie politicians have voted to ban, in fact. "A current total of 4,316 individuals are using government-provided Internet access to view pornography during work hours," said the site's owner Bernadette Taylor in a letter to Aussie government. Taylor told Newsbytes of the hypocrisy of such heavy-handed government measures and said that it simply "illustrated the inadequacies" of trying to censor material. On Sunday, Aussie Net users, ISPs and civil liberties groups will join forces to protest against the legislation. ®