Someone tried to hack my social media yesterday. Surprisingly, we weren’t able to get any politicians to confirm that they were using Twitter to watch porn in order to bypass transparency laws.īut we did speak to staffers in the Coalition, Labor and the Greens who all confirmed that their bosses were conscious of the fact that when they were viewing websites on Parliamentary assets, the data could be logged and published. Sure, it’s not the best user experience, but the advantage is the only website recorded in that instance would be, which wouldn’t turn any heads in an audit of MPs browsing habits. So how does Twitter fit into this? Well, if someone wanted to watch some porn but didn’t want to visit an actual porn website, they could just peruse the feeds of Twitter’s various porn accounts. That’s exactly what happened to one NSW minister back in 2010 - he was forced to resign after an audit found he’d visited adult and gambling websites on his office computer. If a politician was, for example, to visit PornHub while in their office or while using a Parliamentary issued laptop or phone, that visit could be logged and potentially published.
That means politicians are hyper aware of the websites they’re visiting either on the Parliamentary network or on devices loaned to them by the Parliament, which usually includes a laptop, phone and iPad. Australia’s Freedom of Information regime is notoriously weak, but there have been examples where politicians have been forced to publish a list of websites they’ve visited.