Stars And Stripes Employees Guilty Internet Gambling

An internal investigation launched by the Stars and Stripes discovered that an alarmingly “large proportion” of the news media’s Pacific employees are guilty of spending copious amount of time on internet casino and pornographic sites, this has been confirmed by senior management in the organization.

The violation of internet use during the past month escalated to such an extent that Pacific bureau managers had to jump in and monitor their employees’ internet usage closely.

General Manager of Pacific Stars and Stripes John Panasiewicz is not prepared to divulge how many of the Company’s approximately 200 Pacific workers are current suspects of violating the company’s internet usage policy.  It is said that a large proportion of the staff are guilty and this has been a point of concern for Pacific Stars and Stripes.

The amount is higher than I suspected,” Panasiewicz mentioned.

The suspects at this point in time are U.S. civilians and service members, Japanese and South Korean civilian employees who accessed illegal web sites from a number of Stars and Stripes offices across the Pacific region, Panasiewicz said.

To date no one has faced any disciplinary action as yet; since the investigation is still underway, said Lt. Col. Autum Whalen, Stars and Stripes Pacific operation commander.

“Presently we are consulting various sources with the Judge Advocate’s office, the publisher and personnel offices to make sure that the proper channels are followed, Whalen said.

Stars and Stripes’ employee internet usage is monitored on a monthly basin to ensure that the organization has sufficient bandwidth to conduct its business Max Lederer said.  The organization also taps into employees’ computers to ascertain whether or not the websites they are visiting are deemed appropriate or illegal, for example gambling, day-trading and pornography sites.”

“At times we do find employees who are guilty of accessing these sites, in the event we do find the guilty party proper company procedures are followed; be it a suspension, termination of contract, stern warning or reprimand, this is done according to the nature of the trespass.”

Stars and Stripes are editorially independent from the Department of Defence by congressional mandate.   However, the organization does receive a subsidy from the Defence Department to assist in additional costs of delivering a daily newspaper to soldiers on the front lines and this is subjected to military personnel regulations.

The previous month’s Internet usage report did not indicate any illegal usage in Stars and Stripes’ central editorial and administrative offices in Washington, said Allio.

The organization’s European offices only recently implemented the software that monitors improper internet usage in the Pacific; Rick Braun said – he’s the general manager for the European theatre.  We have found no employee guilty of improper gambling or pornographic internet usage in our European offices to date he also said.