Banned by the DOI

There is a post at Little Green Footballs which claims that the United States Department of the Interior has recently installed software that blocks from its employees access to several high-profile non-left-wing blogs and "all" blogs with a Blogspot URL -- although liberal Blogspot fixture Eschaton is listed as passing through. (See below.)

In an update, LGF goes on to provide two lists from Gates of Vienna of blogs that are blocked and blogs that still pass through.:

Blocked Blogs:

• Captain's Quarters
• Cox and Forkum
• Gates of Vienna
• Little Green Footballs
• Michael J. Totten
• Michelle Malkin
• Power Line
• Protein Wisdom
• Rantings of a Sandmonkey
• Roger L. Simon
• The Adventures of Chester
• The American Thinker
• The Belmont Club
• The Doctor is In
• Wizbang

Blogs not blocked:

• DailyKos
• Democrat Underground
• America blog
• Atrios.blogspot.com
• JuanCole.com
• The Huffington Post
• Talkingpointsmemo.com

Gates of Vienna goes on to note that, "In fact, every blog linked to off of [far-left] DailyKos seems to work."

While employers are certainly free to prevent their workers from spending time at work reading blogs, it is patently obvious [Or not. See update and comments. -- ed] from the above lists -- without even looking at the DOI's policy on Internet blocking (which is unavailable as of this writing anyway) -- that this policy is aimed at anything but increased worker productivity. Furthermore, this blatant censorship is being conducted by a government entity and not by a private employer (who should certainly be free to impose whatever restrictions he likes on what can pass through his firewall). Such government censorship, however limited in scope, is wrong and is a troubling sign.

One commenter at LGF notes that it is often possible in such situations to circumvent some firewalls through the use of subscriptions to RSS feeds. (This reminds me that I should update my blog template to include my FeedBurner feed.)

I would note further, as a Blogspot blogger, that there is potentially another way around this block. It is possible under "Dashboard:Email:Settings" to set a value for "BlogSend Address" in order to " have your blog mailed to [it] whenever you publish." One could then set up an email address list to forward posts to anyone behind such a block as another way around this shameful practice.

-- CAV

Updates

10-16-06: (1) Hmmm. That might be humble pie I smell cooking! Something like this -- which wasn't censorship -- seems to have happened in another government department before. See the comments. (2) Here is an in-depth update by Baron Bodissey of Gates of Vienna. The quote in the following passage are from an IT consultant friend's take on what we are likely seeing here:

"Here's what happened", he said. "The department started blocking certain categories of websites, and then made a list of exceptions that would be allowed through the filter. That's a long list, and it would be passed down the food chain from the Network Administrator through his subordinates until it reached the poor schmoe at the bottom of the heap who would have to do all the data entry to list the exceptions.

"Now imagine this guy: he just happens to be a left-winger, and likes to hang out at Daily Kos and Atrios during his downtime. He realizes that won't be able to do that any more, so he adds his favorite sites to the list of exceptions, and then that he can continue with his recreational reading.

"He thinks that nobody will notice, or that his superiors are too stupid to ever figure it out. In any case, it never occurs to him that there are conservatives at DOI who will notice and object."

I like this explanation. It's simple, it's elegant, and it satisfies Occam's razor. It posits the least amount of conspiracy -- at most, a couple of flunkies in the basement of DOI taking action on their own behalf -- and it doesn't require that my sources be liars.

This sounds most likely to me at this point, but if I hear otherwise, I'll mention it.