NASA employees have been caught at the centre of a child porn scandal, it has been revealed.

Staff members were found to have stashes of child porn and were found to have illegally purchased the sickening images while they were working at the agency.

However, their names have never been released because of government guidelines which protect their privacy.

The actions of the staff members were discovered during Project Flicker – an investigation by the FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) into American citizens buying child pornography from Belarus and Ukraine.

In 2007 officials found that more than 5,200 citizens across the country had paid for a subscription to extreme websites in order to access the content.

Of those, 264 of these worked for the Pentagon as either employees or contractors. Some of them worked for the NSA and had top security clearance.

The revelations were uncovered after an investigation by the Daily Mail. The newspaper was contacted by NASA who claimed the employees were no longer working at the agency.

However, it was unclear whether they have been charged for their crimes.

When a similar investigation into Pentagon employees was conducted by the Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS) they only investigated 52 of the suspects and 212 people on the list were not even questioned.

Some of the young children that appeared in the videos were as young as three.

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