US government employee stores 187,000 sexually explicit images on work laptop, loses access to nuclear secrets

After being discovered, the employee claimed mental health issues behind his act. He added that he uploaded the images during a depressive episode.

A US Department of Energy (DOE) employee lost his security clearance after he uploaded 187,000 pornographic images to his work laptop. The department found that he had attempted to store his personal porn collection on the device after they were alerted to a large backup on the government network.

The employee claimed he uploaded the images to ‘play’ with them using AI tools. (Unsplash)

The incident happened in March 2023, and his security clearance to office materials, including nuclear information, was revoked. A year later, in 2024, an Administrative Judge determined that his authorisation to the network “should not be restored.”

The employee claimed that he wanted to use images collected over the last 30 years as training data for an AI-image generator. According to a DOE report on the incident, the man said he was suffering from depression and during one of his “depressive episodes” he started “playing” with the AI tools to cope with “extreme isolation and loneliness.” The report further claimed that the employee explored “robot pornography.”

What happened to the employee?

The DOE report stated, “The Individual subsequently underwent an evaluation by a DOE-contracted psychologist ( DOE Psychologist) who determined that the Individual was experiencing a major depressive episode at a moderate to severe level, the symptoms of which compromised his judgment, trustworthiness, and ability to comply with rules and policies.”

The employee, during the hearing, presented documents to support his mental illness claims. He argued that a change in medication would “prevent him from experiencing similar symptoms in the future,” adding that he has taken measures to ensure that his personal files are not stored on the DOE network again.

“However, the DOE Psychologist opined that the Individual's prognosis for avoiding a future mental health episode that would compromise his judgment, trustworthiness, and reliability was only fair and the individual did not bring forth sufficient evidence to mitigate the security concerns presented by his misuse of information technology,” the DOE report stated.