*&^%$^!!!#@$

What the heck are they thinking?

Must be the same people they have running the Marine Corps Times... (OK, I did not say that - I just punished myself)

I will be gone all day but will link to this later. Thanks.

Done!

The following is my email (after registration at their website ) in regard to your request:

Dear Sir/Madam:

It has been brought to my attention that your censorship software (for lack of a better description) is being used by the United States Air Force to control Internet access from computers operated within its purview. If this is true; I believe the database(s) that you are using for filtering activity for this Armed Service; as well as perhaps others under contract, is flawed and doing an extreme disservice to our servicemembers.

Obviously, not knowing your protocols; I still feel that if THE ELITE MEDIA is allowed to saturate our Warriors within the battlespace, if
al-Jazerra, et. al. are available and if other forms of news and views are available by any other means; then serious re-thinking should be done in the database filters you offer your customers. Also, knowing that you are only a contractor; I still believe you have an obligation to pass along critiques, opinions and judgements received from the public to your customer; i.e. The United States Air Force.

MILSEC and PERSEC are of the most necessary and fundamental concerns within and without our Military; but freedom of information should have a position within these frameworks. I implore you to address this issue. The Blogosphere and Blogs are not inherently evil. Some form of vetting must be established. It's the right thing to do.

--
Sincerely,
_______

A "plugin" "security filter(s)" that causes our Warriors to be ill-informed and at the mercy of THE ELITE MEDIA is an abomination for those who guarantee the 1st Amendment and free expression in our beloved Country.

It is bad enough to listen to the screeds of the Generation X, Y, Zero pundits who have never touched blood nor smelled death. The ignorant c*nts that get their "face time" on cable news outlets are a thorn in this veteran's side.

Let's get this changed!

USAF (SSgt 1966-1970)

'My guess is Websense determines who goes on "the list" and the military
simply subscribes to a package.'

This is not entirely correct. I am a teacher and my school district uses Websense to block websites from the students.
My understanding is that Websense is a software package that allows the purchaser to block 'objectionable categories' not specific websites. The military should control the settings and determine the 'categories' to block.
If the military's package is like ours, Websense should list the reason for the blockage when the website is selected. Our package also has a link that enables us to contact the administrator of our package and request that the site be unblocked.
Because the 'categories for blockage' are very general, many good websites are blocked at my school. Our package also blocks sites for 'hosting violations?'as well as content. Good luck.

'My guess is Websense determines who goes on "the list" and the military
simply subscribes to a package.'

This is not entirely correct. I am a teacher and my school district uses Websense to block websites from the students.
My understanding is that Websense is a software package that allows the purchaser to block 'objectionable categories' not specific websites. The military should control the settings and determine the 'categories' to block.
If the military's package is like ours, Websense should list the reason for the blockage when the website is selected. Our package also has a link that enables us to contact the administrator of our package and request that the site be unblocked.
Because the 'categories for blockage' are very general, many good websites are blocked at my school. Our package also blocks sites for 'hosting violations?'as well as content. Good luck.

I believe Pat is correct. I once worked at a company where Websense blocked access to job sites like monster.com. My current company also uses Websense but does not (though maybe they should given the morale).

Greyhawk,
Run into the websense problem in Graf. Surprised they have it in a deployed environment. Bottomline, it's an attempt to save bandwith. Whatever the metatags ("chat", "personnel", "politics"...or in Oliver Willis's case "sex")it blocks those not deemed mission essential. CNN ok. Money.CNN not. Easy work around? I use an rss aggregator, bloglines. Trade offs. Instapundit (and LGF) will appear in full posts. Other excellent blogs, like Belmont Club and most blogspots (except, unfortunately Atrios) only appear as headlines. Someone smarter than me can tell you why.

Good luck.

I think this might require a all to Websense. The sites blocked/allowed have an interesting connection. Good news/bad news! (Tin foil hat is now off!)

Websence works much the same as a search engine. They utilize web crawlers to go out, collect URL's and then classify the subject matter in to a major subject group.

The IT manager for the lan/wan can then choose which major subject groups they want the filter side of the software to block.

There's at least 4 (probably a couple others) catagories that blogs would be clasified in to, Militancy and Extremist Sites, News and Media, Social Organizations, Society and Lifestyles.

Each major catagory is then broken down further into sub-cat's.

The IT manager duing the set up process can pick and choose which catagories they want the application to allow to pass through, and which they want it to block. It's basically like running a front end firewall that has the ability to pick and choose what it will block and what it won't.

Submission to indiviudal IT managers is probably the only effective way to get the blocks removed due to the way the package works. Since the IT manager selects the content that they want to allow/disallow thier users to view on their network.

Only possiblity I could envision coming from Websense would be for them to create a new major catagory heading in thier database specifically for blogs. The web crawlers they utilize are going to capture URL's no matter what, it's getting them to properly catagorize the blogs rather than lumping in with whatever else they happen to be grouping them with to seperate out blogs from the rest of the group.

An example would be, I doubt an IT manager on a *.mil lan is going to allow Military Extremist traffic in to thier network, if Websence is currently grouping blogs in with Military and Extremist catagory, they would be blocked auto-maticly by the software.

The person to really contact for expert advise would probably be Sgt. Chris Missik (http://www.missick.com/).

angel

Just had another thought, it might be possible to get around some of the filters by utilizing click through links on http://www.lt-smash.us/ or even http://www.missick.com/ since neither of those URL's are categorized by Websense, someone who is on a network behind the utility would have to try it out to see if they worked.

If it is a viable work-around, it would be possible then to look at building a site specifically to be utlized as a mirror to allow 3rd party access to Mil Blogs.

angel

My (government) uses Websense. The blogs that are blocked for me fall under the category "tastless," which I find amusing.

Make that my government JOB.

We used "websense" for a time and yes there is a vanilla package that blocks almost all blogs, websites that allow purchasing, news outlets, etc. It is up to the web administrator to open these up and many blogs that are not “well know” will not be privy to the administrator. You should be able to submit the site’s URL to the administrator and he/she would then open it up.. If this is not happening I would agree with censorship but it appears this is indeed happening.

It is possible that the innocuous reference to "The Sims 2" is what caused Instapundit to be blocked; the Air Force servers I was subjected to in Germany blocked the category of "Games", which meant that I could not order computer games online from any computer on the base, including the ones at the base library, which were for non-official use only. I had to use the computers at the Family Service Center to get to a website that sold games.

It is also possible that some of the references to beheadings and other atrocities is the cause, or perhaps "Al J*zira" is a filter.

How is it that many of our libraries have completely unfiltered content, letting even children access the most revolting content, yet people in the military have to have even benign stuff blocked? If I were faced with this, I'd have a stateside buddy set up a proxy site to relay content from wherever I wanted.