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The U.K. parliament would prefer you didn't think its workers spend all day looking at porn. "We do not consider the data to provide an accurate representation of the number of purposeful requests made by network users," a House of Commons spokesperson told the BBC, in response to a Huffington Post UK report that paints British federal employees as a bunch of horndogs. The Huffington Post filed a Freedom of Information request asking how many requests for pornographic content came through parliamentary servers over the course of a calendar year, and the answer may surprise you: between May 2012 and July 2013, parliamentary staff, including MPs and their underlings, made nearly 300,000 attempts to access websites classified as pornographic on the government's servers. 

This is awkward, kind of, because jeepers that's a lot of porn. Here's how the monthly requests break down: 

Obviously there are a bunch of red flags immediately apparent in that graph that should vindicate the House of Commons, at least a bit. The numbers are fairly skewed: November 2012 accounts for over a third of all requests, while February 2013 only had 15 requests and June 2013 had 397. Obviously the number of searches aren't swaying that much per month just because of peaks and valleys in personal loneliness.

The House of Commons said there are a "variety of ways in which websites can be designed to act, react and interact and due to the potential operation of third party software," like pop-ups and sites that load multiple times during one visit. Those could all contribute to the staggering results. And anyone who has ever worked for a federal government knows their definition of a pornographic site is often fairly ludicrous. (True story: while in school, I spent my summers working for the Canadian federal government and they eventually banned Deadspin, ostensibly a sports website that has been known to post photos of naked famous people, from their servers after deeming it pornography.) 

But, still, the numbers are pretty staggering in the end. And we all know there are some people in the office that will watch pornography if they stay late, or if their computer and cubicle are placed in just such a way that they won't get caught. Surveys have shown roughly 3 percent of Americans will admit to it. So why not the Brits? 

In the end, Prime Minister David Cameron can't be too happy about this. He's the one trying to ban porn from the country to save the women and children. That is, unless you ask your internet service provider to let you watch porn. Then it's still perfectly legal once you have that awkward conversation. But Cameron has a bunch of pervs right there in his own offices. 

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.

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