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Interior's Statement On Blocked Blogs

Frank Quimby, the Interior Department spokesman I quoted in today's column on the new blog-blocking ban for Interior employees, e-mailed a detailed response to me after I finishing writing last week. Here is that statement:

Our vendor who is carrying out the Internet-filtering project is part of a consortium of vendors who maintain a database that contains the categorization of all public Web sites that have been discovered on the Internet. When we by policy decide to block a category of sites, the list of those sites to be blocked comes from this database. They are not rated, evaluated or further categorized by content -- only by high-level category.

While the department's system administrator has the capability to unblock a site by making a request to the vendor to remove a specific site from the blocked list, that is a formal process that is logged and audited. No such requests have been made on this subject.

Finally a suggestion was made that our site may have been hacked and this selective filtering of blog sites was being carried out by a hacker. While highly unlikely, we checked and this has not occurred.

So, in summary, we are blocking all sites that are categorized as blogs, period. No further consideration is made. We do not/have not/will not block a blog based on its content. It gets blocked because it has been identified as a blog.

This system is not perfect, but it is a learning/adaptive system that gets better over time as we tune it. There will be cases of a site being mischaracterized as a blog when it is not. Conversely, there will be blogs that are not identified as such for one technical reason or another and will not be blocked.

The key is for employees to use the tools provided and assist us in making it better. The folks making false claims about content blocking want to remove the restriction on blogs altogether.

Federal Times also had a story on Interior's blog ban. Quimby told that publication that a review of 22 blogs on Friday showed that only five of the 15 conservative sites that allegedly were blocked were inaccessible, while two of the seven liberal sites were.

UPDATE: At the request of "Politics Central" at Pajamas Media, Baron Bodissey of Gates of Vienna investigated the blog ban at Interior more deeply and has a new theory on what happened: "[T]he issue is not selective blocking of blogs; it's the selective unblocking of blogs," probably by a low-level employee who likes to read liberal blogs.

Posted by Danny | 08:05 PM

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