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July 27, 2007BELTWAY BLOGROLL
Blog Ban Was Political, Ex-Kentucky Official Says
Reprinted from Monday's PM Edition of Technology Daily
By Michael Martinez
A man who used to manage the computer system used by Kentucky's executive branch told a federal court on Friday that aides to Republican Gov. Ernie Fletcher blocked state employees from a blog for political reasons last year.
Michael Inman, the state's former technology commissioner, said in an affidavit submitted in the U.S. district court in Eastern Kentucky that Fletcher's office specifically targeted a blog written by a Democratic critic of the administration.
Inman's affidavit supports accusations made in a federal lawsuit submitted last year by Mark Nickolas, the author of BluegrassReport. Nickolas also managed the failed 2003 gubernatorial campaign of now-U.S. Rep. Ben Chandler against Fletcher.
Fletcher's administration has maintained that state employees were blocked from reading Nickolas' blog at work last year as part of a content-neutral Web-filtering initiative to limit distractions at the workplace. Other filtered pages included ESPN.com and various entertainment sites.
But Nickolas has alleged that the administration cut off access to his site in response to things he said online and in interviews with newspapers, charges that were backed by Inman. Nickolas' lawsuit notes that his blog was blocked after he was quoted in a story in The New York Times about Fletcher being indicted in a hiring scandal.
In his affidavit, Inman said former deputy Mark Rutledge, who has since become the state's chief information officer, bragged to him about blocking Nickolas' blog. Inman also alleged that Rutledge said to him that he doubted anyone would discover that the administration blocked the site because they "hid it in a bunch of other stuff."
"Based on my conversations with Rutledge, it was apparent that the state had intentionally blocked BluegrassReport.org and had blocked the category of blogs and other categories of Web sites to disguise that fact," Inman said.
Inman added that the decision to block BluegrassReport came directly from the governor's office as a result of Nickolas' criticism of the administration.
A Fletcher spokeswoman declined to comment on Inman's affidavit because the case is still pending. Fletcher, who was never charged with any crimes in the hiring scandal, is up for re-election this fall.
Nickolas recently moved to Montana and stopped writing BluegrassReport. He has launched another blog, Rocky Mountain Report, which focuses on politics in Western states.
Inman also said he was never told why he was dismissed last summer and replaced by Rutledge. He has been highly critical of the administration during the past several months. Earlier this spring, he accused Fletcher's administration of monitoring the e-mail accounts of state employees to measure their loyalty.
He told the court last week that he was "compelled to state the truth" about the administration and its explanation for why Nickolas' site was blocked.
"I believe the state has authority to block Web sites that cause disruption in the workplace," he said, in the affidavit. "I disagree, however, that decisions about which Web sites to block should be based on the official disapproval of the content of particular Web sites."
Posted by Danny | 12:05 PM
