TRENTON, N.J. – A state Commerce and Economic Growth Commission Web site link to its “business resource center” took viewers Tuesday afternoon – and maybe for much longer – to full-color, hard-core teen pornography. Learning of the cyber snafu, high-level state executives rushed to try to shut it down. But they initially encountered confusion. The porn popped up on some computers. On others, the link went to the proper business site.
Visibly embarrassed, aides to Gov. James E. McGreevey were baffled as to why and how it happened.
McGreevey’s staffers said they alerted the Office of Information Technology, which eventually erased the state link to the site.
Micah Rasmussen, spokesman for McGreevey, said he called state police, whose High-Tech Crimes Unit opened an investigation.
“We want this prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” Rasmussen said.
Initially, so concerned were officials that McGreevey’s chief of staff, Jamie Fox, joined communications director Kathy Ellis and Rasmussen in a Statehouse office, huddling over a screen with a reporter to try to solve the issue.
Ellis, using a state computer, followed the prescribed clicks. She landed on the proper business-resource site, not the porn page.
“I’ve done it more than once. It works,” she said.
Others, however, followed identical prompts and landed on porn.
Gannett New Jersey first heard about the site from a caller, a self-described minister from the Keasbey area of Woodbridge. He said he had been seeking data on a corporation, and he went to the business-resource link.
“This was how I was treated,” said the Rev. Damion Barna, who said he had been a volunteer for McGreevey in elections past.
Gannett repeatedly tested the official prompts, and always accessed to the porn site. So did computers in New York and Neptune.
More than an hour after Gannett alerted McGreevey’s office, the site link finally appeared to have been severed from the Commerce Department’s “site index” cyber page.
How long had the link existed? “I have absolutely no idea,” said Commerce Department spokesman Greg Adkins, who did not initially answer reporters phone calls, responding 90 minutes later.
How many people viewed the porn? “I have absolutely no idea,” he said again.
Adkins said the agency had received no complaints about its Web site prior to Gannett’s inquiry.
Rasmussen wondered aloud, as officials tried to solve the problem, “How can it come up on one computer and not another?”
At one point, Rasmussen phoned a Gannett staffer in Trenton to discuss how commercial computers were reaching the porn site while the state’s computers networked to the correct place.
It appeared the company that ran the porn site may have operated in Uruguay. The creator of the link may also have been overseas, said Rasmussen, perhaps in the Dominican Republic.
“I suspected this may have had to do with out-sourcing state work, away from better-quality American workers,” said Barna, the Woodbridge minister.
There was no evidence this was the case.
“I hope McGreevey takes this as a warning sign that things are not well on his watch,” said the minister, who said he does not have a church.
Rasmussen said he did not know if McGreevey knew Barna.