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HotAir, MEMRI, Jihad Watch blocked by the Feds?

Hello. Robert Spencer here from Jihad Watch. Several days ago I received this email:

I wanted to drop a line about the inability to access JihadWatch at work. I work for the Fed Gov. Three weeks ago, Memri was blocked. Two weeks ago HotAir, which I used to look at on my lunch break for your updates, was blocked. As of Friday,June 29th, JihadWatch was blocked. I can however, visit CAIR, read anything about Islam, and even get the Arab news. The censors I deal with are from the Dallas area. It is very easy to see that this censor is not operating according to the proper rules of access. They are operating by their political beliefs (or hopes.) It is unfortunate that these people block the very information that we need in these times....

Also, all this week I have gotten emails telling me that Jihad Watch has suddenly been blocked in all sorts of places: Fidelity Investments, JPMorgan Chase, even the City of Chicago. Word is that Jihad Watch and other sites have suddenly been labeled as purveying \"hate speech.\"

This is a tried and true tactic of the Left: intellectually bankrupt as it is, it silences its critics rather than dealing with them on the level of ideas. They can't answer us, so they try to shut us up and discredit us. Leftists, as well as apologists for Islamic jihad terrorism, label their opponents \"hatemongers\" and \"bigots,\" hoping thereby to make people of good will turn away from their message. And the politicized nature of this Internet censorship will come as a surprise to no one.

In reality, Jihad Watch is dedicated to the defense of human rights for all people against those who would impose Islamic law, with its institutionalized discrimination against women and religious minorities, over both Muslim and non-Muslim societies. There is no \"hatred\" in this, except when we report the words of hatred and supremacism of the Islamic jihadists. We are trying to raise awareness of the nature, extent, and goals of the global jihad, which threatens everyone who loves and cherishes freedom and the equality of rights of all people before the law.

And so, we are going to fight this, as best we can, and I am sure MEMRI and HotAir are also. Today I am going to contact every organization that, according to emails I have received, has banned Jihad Watch, and urge them to remove the ban. Wherever you are working today, if you get a chance please take a moment to check if you still have access to conservative sites -- and if you don't, lodge a respectful but firm protest. Let us not take lying down being vilified and silenced, when we are telling the truth.

Guess even the feds don't like their employees surfing the web at work..

When you are using your own computer and surfing on your own time come an bit*h to me then.

Ferno wrote:some information on MEMRI

Well, Not that I trust MEMRI necessarily, but kurtnimmo didn't exactly sound like an unbiased source either.

<here> he actually seems to be defending Ward Churchill's essay which said, essentially, that many of the victims of the 9-11 attack deserved what they got.

Grendel wrote:Guess even the feds don't like their employees surfing the web at work.. :roll:

So why block Jihad Watch, MEMRI, and HotAir specifically?

If the issue is simply with people surfing the web at work, they'd block ESPN and other sports sites, youtube, myspace, and other similar sites as well. If the issue was people surfing political sites, they'd block CAIR, Daily Kos, and Democratic Underground as well.

Try revising your theory. Those specific sites are being blocked for specific reasons. TB might not have given the right reasons, but "well you're at work so you shouldn't be surfing the web, that's why they blocked you" isn't a good explanation of why those specific sites were blocked.

(Ferno, don't trust everything you read on teh intraweb. MEMRI is legit.)

Lothar wrote:Try revising your theory. Those specific sites are being blocked for specific reasons. TB might not have given the right reasons, but "well you're at work so you shouldn't be surfing the web, that's why they blocked you" isn't a good explanation of why those specific sites were blocked.

Who says that only those sites where blocked ? Not worth to think about it more than a minute w/o background references IMHO. The way blocking in bigger entities works is that an admin takes a look at the traffic and decides what to block w/ entity policy as a lose guideline. Find the admin to figure out the reason. No conspiracies involved.

True, we can't say for certain it's related to content until we confirm that it's not related to usage or \"workplace-distraction\".

For example, at my old workplace, the DBB.net was one of the external sites blocked just because of the regular daily frequency of hits (100% me, I'm sure).

Grendel wrote:

Lothar wrote:Try revising your theory. Those specific sites are being blocked for specific reasons. TB might not have given the right reasons, but "well you're at work so you shouldn't be surfing the web, that's why they blocked you" isn't a good explanation of why those specific sites were blocked.

Who says that only those sites where blocked ? ;)

The original statement (which is not hard to find just from googling for "Jihad Watch" and searching for the word "blocked" on the first page) seemed to imply that "site has been blocked" was not a regular occurrence. Furthermore, the blockage was not limited to a single office, but to several large companies and parts of the federal government that likely use the same blocking service ("Site Coach" according to this.) It's possible that other sites have been blocked, but I see no mention of such a thing... and this fits a pattern I've observed.

In my experience, this sort of thing tends to happen with shocking regularity to sites like Jihad Watch, LGF, HotAir, and Iraq The Model. In the dozens of cases I've heard where one of those sites was blocked, there has been a consistent theme:

1) several sites of that specific political bent have been blocked (often marked as "hate speech" or similar, as is the case if you do the background reading here)
2) sites of opposing political bents (including pro-Jihad sites) are explicitly mentioned as not blocked. (I have NEVER heard of a situation on any reasonable scale wherein a bunch of left sites were blocked while correspondingly large and well-trafficked right sites were not.)
3) no mention of "neutral" sites like ESPN, CNN, or youtube being blocked. (In a single post, like the one here, this may simply be an oversight; in the dozens of posts I've seen like this, the lack of any such mention makes it highly unlikely those sites are being blocked.)
4) a string of complaints leads to the block being lifted, usually with a "sorry, site was miscategorized" apology or a "the site was never blocked" misdirection play. (This suggests very strongly to me that the block is typically instituted by a single admin for political reasons, rather than being agreed upon by the whole administrative group for productivity reasons.)

This is a pattern which is not explained by a simple appeal to "website traffic" or "dropping productivity". Not on this scale. We're not talking about Jihad Watch being blocked by the local Kwik-e-mart because this one cashier surfs it too often... we're talking about Jihad Watch and several other sites of the same political alignment being blocked on a large scale, certainly large enough that other sites get a similar amount of traffic and would therefore be blocked if it really was about the traffic. The fact that the block tends to get lifted after it's brought to light suggests to me that it doesn't stand up to scrutiny -- that it's not for good reason like "website traffic".

You describe the way blocking is SUPPOSED to work in an entity that size, but it's quite obvious that it doesn't always work that way. I'm not suggesting there's a conspiracy, only that there's a pattern. It only takes one admin to decide to silence those he disagrees with. It only takes one admin to decide to block a site that, while not particularly higher traffic than others, has a message he disagrees with. In my experience, such rogue admins almost always silence right-leaning or anti-Jihad political sites (though it's often a different subset of that group of sites... it's not the same admin every time.)