Porn Vs. Politics as Usual

Elected officials worldwide, and especially in the U.S., are notorious for being overly distracted, aloof and absentminded during routine and even special legislative sessions.  In other words, they apparently believe that there's better things to do than what they're paid for, like going on vacation. What would your boss say about that (and, yes, we are their bosses)?

A recent incident involving hardcore porn broadcast in the Indonesian parliament makes clear that some creative hackers at least have had enough of this politics as usual, especially when it comes to state censorship.

The day in the Indonesian parliament began like any other, with the legislative menu du jour on the screens throughout the building. Without their knowing it, however, the elected officials were soon to have an (un)pleasant surprise involving fornicating "young teens," according to the Toronto Sun. Porn has recently been censored in neighboring Malaysia and Singapore, and a vote to totally ban all pornographic materials spearheaded by the "information minister" was scheduled for the Indonesian Parliament the next week. So a window of opportunity to make several points at once was opened, and the hackers made full use of it. Talk about a rude awakening.

For a full fifteen minutes, understandably causing a stir among the elected official of the world's most populous Muslim nation, politicians got a public peep show they will never forget. The Associate Press reported that House Secretary-General Nining Indra said the "unwanted interruption" was probably caused by someone trying to access a porn site on the internal computer system. Put differently, politics as usual per the above, gone wild. The hackers likely exploited this legislator's lapse of judgment to make their points. Parliamentary security had to shut down the system and reboot to make the porn go away, but the global media fanfare subsided much more slowly.

Pornography always raises (and always should) serious sexual exploitation and censorship issues, just ask its victims, profiteers and aficionados. But what porn usually doesn't do is expose serious problems in existing political systems globally. With the upcoming American film Middle Men celebrating the rise of the internet porn industry in the 1990s like other films have glorified the drug-dealing of the 1960s (which has lead to the current Mexican drug war zone just miles south of the U.S.), surely there's a lot we can learn from porn vs. politics as usual in the Indonesian parliament. Hopefully sooner rather than later.

There is a serious lack of urgency in getting things done in government nationally and globally, and we all know that there are more than a few urgent problems to be solved. A "paralysis of analysis" isn't the only problem. Often it seems as though the only time politicians take on a bold entrepreneurial spirit is when they're fundraising and campaigning. Fundraising doesn't end when they're elected, but campaigning needs to better translate into a zeal for delivering on the mandates for which constituents (us) elect them, every minute of every day they're on the job.

Wouldn't you be fired from your job(s) if you didn’t deliver, let alone were watching porn on the clock?

Photo Credit: Pink Moose