The mere discussion of personal use of government equipment will conjure up visions of employees with their feet up on their desks, browsing Web shopping sites for hours, or Pentagon tunnel rats indulging in long games of networked Doom while bombs drop in Eastern Europe. The proposal makes eminent sense, if applied rationally. People have lunch breaks. They come in early and stay late. They work weekends.
Government workers fall on the same bell curve of productivity as their private-sector counterparts.
Companies generally permit reasonable personal use as long as it is legal, doesn't interfere with work and doesn't endanger the network through the introduction of rogue software. Some people will no doubt argue that personal use of PCs will waste government assets. But that's blather. Once an agency has bought or leased a PC and created the LAN and support environment for it, the cost of a lunch half-hour spent playing solitaire or browsing the Web cannot even be measured. The expense is that small.