Question - single 'porn' image and clearance

Hello team - new here.

Have a question that it’s burning in my mind for a while, and I wanted to see the opinions of people here.

I’m trying to get back, sometime, to government projects. I’ve not been in one for a while; since the pandemic I’ve been doing mostly commercial work.

Back in 2019, I did work for a government contractor. At one time, I had to take a compliance training, and then upload the certificate to the company’s file servers. Thing is, I did this training on my personal device (an iPad). What ended up happening was that I uploaded a porn image instead of the certificate. A single image.

Like I mentioned, this was my personal device. It wasn’t child porn and it wasn’t that much of a graphic image; that is, the picture did not depict a graphic act of sex. Won’t go much into details on the image itself.

Anyhow. I was called on it, of course. I erased the image and replaced it with the certificate. My supervisor did also called me out on it, but I didn’t meet with HR, nor was I formally reprimanded for it (I did not get an email / letter from HR).

This was NOT on a GFE. The company allowed access to its systems on many devices, including iPads. I was just careless / distracted taking this training (I was watching TV at the same time. I know, I should be paying attention to the training but frankly, sometimes, when you take one of these trainings you can (almost) recite them back by memory).

I’m on a private company now with no government contracts, and I’m not 100% looking for a move right now. But I am making some background moves to see if I can get back to a government contractor role at some point. How should I address this in my SF-86? Mention it? Let it slide and wait to see if the investigator is alerted by that old company? This behavior is not habitual on me; I normally don’t browse the internet for that stuff.

Thanks.

Yes you should list it. It can fall under a couple of different categories: employment misconduct or misuse of information technology systems. Either way, it is better to offer the information yourself and give the explanation than have the information be found by some other means and become an honesty issue. Good luck, from an investigator.

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Mention it all day. The last thing you want is your supervisor to be interviewed by an investigator and they find out about it after the fact. You being honest about it and coming out in front of it goes a long way versus us finding out and confronting you on it.

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