City hunts worker over sick jokes

Published on 07/01/2005 14:41

A COUNCIL worker is facing the threat of disciplinary action after being caught searching the internet for sick jokes about the Asian tsunami.

An investigation has been launched after the operator of an internet blog site complained to the city council.

The operator said his site, which contains a variety of news items and internet "funnies", received a hit from someone at the authority who had used the Yahoo! search engine to look for "tsunami joke".

Council officials believe it could take days to identify the individual involved as they have more than 20,000 employees.

BT, which administers the council’s web service, is believed to be helping with the investigation. It is not yet known whether staff had been using e-mails to circulate jokes about the disaster.

The webmaster, on www.freedomforall.net wrote: "Somebody working for Edinburgh District Council [sic] thinks it would be fun to have a few ‘tsunami jokes’ to tell. If the sickness of what was being done is not bad enough, they are using the council’s computers and their work time to find them. I felt it was good form to give them a call and let them know. They called me to say it is being raised as a "security incident", will be investigated and result in action."

A council spokeswoman said: "We are investigating and will take appropriate action if necessary."