By Elmer Andrew
Special to YNOT
NOGALES, Ariz. – If you’re a Gizmodo reader, you might have seen a recent article mocking a brave member of the U.S. Border Patrol (USBP) over watching porn at work and subsequently blaming his inappropriate access of adult websites on the inadequate web filter used by the Customs and Border Protection Office (CPBO).
While the Gizmodo piece suggests the USBP agent was being pretty brazen by blaming his porn surfing on the same people who don’t want him watching porn in the first place, the officer’s defense is anything but an audacious attempt at blame-shifting.
I should know, because I’m the USBP agent in question.
Before getting into all the problems with the filter, let me explain how and why all this so-called “porn surfing” happened to begin with.
Despite what Gizmodo suggests, it’s not like I sit around an office all day with my hands down my pants, feverishly searching out online porn when I should be keeping myself busy with forwarding racist jokes about Mexicans to my supervisor.
For starters, I’m organized and good at managing my time, so I can surf porn several hours a shift and still have plenty of time to find good alt-right memes to share with my boss. For that matter, since I follow both Donald Trump and Donald Trump Jr. on Twitter, I don’t have to do anything to find such memes. All I have to do is sit back and passively receive alerts and before long I’ll have a week’s worth of forwarding material.
I also do lots of field work, which is very timeconsuming. Patrolling the deserts of southern Arizona for human smugglers, incoming gang members, suspected Islamic radicals and backpack-laden drug mules is tedious, slow-moving work. That’s the main reason I typically just shoot anybody I see walking around in the desert, then toss them over the fence into Mexico if it turns out they’re an American citizen or the gun I could have sworn they pointed at me turns out to have been a canteen, their middle finger, or a particularly large marijuana cigarette.
My point is, working for Border Patrol isn’t all porn surfing and rainbows. It’s also about the indiscriminate use of lethal force against severely dehydrated people — and a horrifying amount of dull, needless paperwork, should anybody find out you’ve done so.
At any rate, with respect to all this porn I was allegedly surfing, the truth is the web filters installed by the CPBO just weren’t up to the task of blocking every last pixel of porn on the internet, and my actions were meant to help address this serious design flaw. After all, how can a filter manufacturer know whether their product is substandard if they never get any feedback from users of the product?
It’s important to understand and appreciate I stepped up and took the initiative here. Rather than sit back and wait to be told to stress-test the office’s web content filters, I made the proactive decision to confirm the filters were up to snuff (no pun intended).
Instead of applauding my unsolicited and selfless extracurricular efforts, the department dispatched its morality police to invade my privacy using a program called “Splunk,” which allegedly spiders our network looking for attempts to violate our agency’s internet use policy, but which sure sounds like a euphemism for male ejaculate to me.
Without my investigation, the CPBO never would have known its filter can be defeated simply by using the image search on Bing, as opposed to googling everything. You’d think they’d give me a raise, or at least a plaque declaring me the employee of the month, but instead I get written up, made the object of ridicule and referenced on Gizmodo in a post that makes me sound like the Marquis de Sacaton.
Making matters worse, I don’t even think the agency has done anything to address the problem with its under-inclusive web filters. They’re just muddling along, pretending the problem is the occasional sexually overenthusiastic agent, as opposed to a massive flaw in the function of its network-protecting software.
So, the next time you read an article about USBP agents who seem to be spending more time minding their zippers than the expanses of the nation’s southern frontier, just remember this: For every porn video one of us downloads, we’re shooting at least four people desperate enough for money they’re willing to walk across the Sonoran desert with a backpack full of cheap, bricked-up Mexican dirtweed in 120-degree heat.
Elmer Andrew is a 14-year veteran of the U.S. Border Patrol. He enjoys surfing the internet, camping, forwarding inappropriate jokes about Mexicans to his supervisor and Keystone Light.
