Man Stores 'Robot Porn' on Govt Computer, Loses Access to Nuclear Secrets

A man who works for the people overseeing America’s nuclear stockpile has lost his security clearance after he uploaded 187,000 pornographic images to a Department of Energy (DOE) network. As part of an appeals process in an attempt to get back his security clearance, the man told investigators he felt his bosses spied on him too much and that the interrogation over the porn snafu was akin to the “Spanish Inquisition."

On March 23, 2023, a DOE employee attempted to back up his personal porn collection. His goal was to use the 187,000 images collected over the past 30 years as training data for an AI-image generator.

He said he had depression, something he’d struggled with since he was a kid. “During the depressive episode he felt ‘extremely isolated and lonely,’ and started ‘playing’ with tools that made generative images as a coping strategy, including ‘robot pornography,’” according to a DOE report on the incident.

Fueled by depression, the man meant to back up his collection and create a base for training AI to make better “robot pornography” but he uploaded it to the government computer by accident. He didn’t realize what he’d done until DOE investigators came calling six months later to ask why their servers were now filled with thousands of pornographic pictures.

“The Individual ‘thought that even though his personal drives were connected to [his employer’s], they were somehow partitioned, and his personal material would not contaminate his [government-issued computer],” a DOE report said.

According to the report, the man was using his cellphone to look at AI-generated porn images, but the screen wasn’t big enough so he moved the pictures to his government computer.

“He also reported that, since the 1990s, he had maintained a ‘giant compressed file with several directories of pornographic images,’ which he moved to his personal cloud storage drive so he could use them to make generative images,” he said. “It was this directory of sexually explicit images that was ultimately uploaded to his employer’s network when he performed a back-up procedure on March 23, 2023.”

The 187,000 images represented a lifetime’s collection. “He stated that the sexually explicit images were an accumulation of ‘25–30 years worth of pornographic material’ he had collected on his personal computer,” he said. He told a DOE psychologist that he should have realized he’d backed up his personal porn collection to a DOE network but said he “was not thinking multiple steps ahead or considering the consequences at the time because he was so depressed.”

According to the DOE employee, he’s been treated for depression since he was a kid. He has ups and downs, and was in a bad headspace when he accidentally uploaded his entire porn collection. He admitted he violated HR rules, but “did not think it was very wrong,” according to the DOE ruling. He also “asserted that his employer ‘was spying on him a little too much’...and compared the interview with his employer following the discovery of his conduct to ‘the Spanish Inquisition.’”

When someone loses their security clearance with the DOE, they can appeal to get it back. In this case, the appeal led to a lengthy investigation and multiple interviews with various DOE psychologists and the man’s wife. When the DOE makes a ruling on an appeal they publish it publicly online, which is why we know about the man’s private porn stash.

He did not get his clearance back. “The DOE Psychologist opined that the individual's probability of experiencing another depressive episode in the future was ‘very high,’” according to the report.