Wednesday, June 2, 2004

Guestblogger Russ Kick's MemoryHole -- banned in Iraq?

Posted by a member of Declan McCullagh's politech mailing list:

I've received email from a person with an [army.mil] address. This person is stationed in Iraq, and he/she tells me that The Memory Hole is blocked on military computers. Trying to get to the site results in the following message:

Access Denied (content_filter_denied)

Your request was denied because of its content categorization: "Extreme;Politics/Religion". For assistance, contact your network support team.

How interesting. I post raw documents created by the government, military, and corporations. These days, that apparently amounts to "political extremism." Naturally, I've filed a FOIA request about this blocking.

Wednesday, June 2, 2004

More on blocked sites for .mil websurfers

Following up on this BoingBoing post about rumors that access to TheMemoryHole is being blocked on military computers in Iraq, BoingBoing reader John -- who has a sister in the Army -- says,

It gets better. Awhile back I sent my sister a link to the story about the man who could make art in cappuccino. She tried to access the story from the military hospital where she works. Here's what she sent back:

"for whatever reason, i can't open that from work. they blocked it and the screen pops up saying

Problem Report. Request Cannot be processed.Problem Cause -- A communication error occurred: "Operation timed out." Note: If the request was denied due to the Content Filterconfiguration. The content category reported is Gen. News. Possible Solution If you feel this site was blocked in error, please contact the HelpDesk at DSN 371-2098 or send an email to. IMD Help Desk.

WARNING! All web activity is logged and monitored by IMD. Unauthorized use of government information systems may lead to disciplinary action or prosecution.

so, i will have to check that out later."

[John continues:]If the request was denied due to the Content Filter configuration is a sentence fragment, but with The content category reported is Gen. News. and If you feel this site was blocked in error, please contact the Help Desk the meaning is clear enough. For whatever reason, "General News" is not fit for our troops. I've been meaning to send her a list of links and ask her if she'd be willing to try to access them (Newsweek? New York Times? Common Dreams? Freerepublic.com [a conservative site]? townhall.com [another conservative site]?) I'm also curious what other kinds of sites she can't visit (geek news? music news? yahoo? wikipedia?) and whether she's prohibited from visiting these sites at work because she's /at work/, or if she's encouraged not to pursue the news in general.

http://www.boingboing.net/2004/06/02/guestblogger_russ_ki.html