Any blogger who is among those banned by the U.S. Department of the Interior, please feel free to swipe these honorary badges, and use them howsoever you choose. I hereby release them into the public domain. There are a variety of sizes below, and here is a link to a great big one with a transparent background, so you can work with it easily. (I should probably mention, I don’t* think this site is one of the blocked sites, so I won’t be using the badge myself; it’s a public service for the rest of you.)
UPDATES: This proposed new DOI seal is pretty funny, too.
* In the comments below, “Worker Bee” informs me that mine is one of the blocked sites after all!
Hey, it gets worse: they’re banning all blogs!
I love it! I’ll post on this tomorrow, if I have time.
Glad you like it! And I have to tell you, as one who has read every word Jack Vance ever published, I very much like your pseudonym.
Yes, Sean, you are one of the folks on the blocked list (or you were as of earlier today).
I’m one of the folks dealing with the fallout from this silly implementation.
I work at one of the Bureaus within DOI, and this is much more mundane than it is sinister. The OIG put out a report indicating that there were quite a few bureaus that had no real web-surfing protections, and concluded that the equivalent of 50 full-time employees worth of time was being consumed on porn, eBay, day trading and gambling.
So in response, the Secretary of Interior mandated that a DOI-wide filtering system had to be stood up ASAP, so all the Bureaus are seeing the effects from the worst of the bunch. Unfortunately, the provider that manages the upstream connection to the Internet for DOI is… well, to be polite I’ll say that they are having some growing pains trying to establish a good mix of skill sets.
They chose a filtering product that was designed for ease of administration rather than precision or accuracy, and they’ve been flailing about for the past few days trying to determine which categories should be blocked and which shouldn’t… and the weblogs category keeps getting turned on and off.
There’s nothing left-versus-right that I’ve seen on which blogs get blocked… it’s just a case of a crappy job of categorizing on the part of the vendor. I’ve seen accuracy so far on some categories of 25% or less.
Don’t attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence.
(I’d rather not endure punishment for speaking the truth about this situation, so please pardon the anonymized comment…)
[…] So, if you suspect you’ve been banned or just want to show your solidarity, why not sport one of these badges of honor? (Courtesy of Sean Gleeeeson) […]
9 most likely reasons access to protein wisdom has been banned by the Department of the Interior
Back in '89, while on a bit of a tequila bender, drove a 1984 Chevy Celebrity into an iceberg, spilling 300,000 gallons of oil into the Atlantic Ocean and getting a bunch of waterbirds all black and gunky…
You should add a line below or around the emblem:
“And that’s no bull!”
I swear there is a great quotation that goes something like “You shall be known by your enemies”…I am constantly reminded of it in relation to W, any number of conservatives and champions of liberty and democracy, and most of my favorite bloggers. For my money, the more someone is hated by the Left and Dems, the better that person is. This Dept. of Interior stuff is so outrageous, and yet why wouldn’t it be a badge of honor?
“the equivalent of 50 full-time employees worth of time was being consumed on porn, eBay, day trading and gambling….”
Any idea where I can get a job application?
Worker Bee, could you check to see if I’m blocked… if so, I’ll happily post a logo to my blog.
Regards,
Sniper One (http://blog.762justice.com)
[…] If your banned as well, you can find your banned logo at Sean Gleeson… […]
[…] Get your badge of honor at Sean Gleeson’s–he has more sizes there. […]
The blundering incompetency angle still isn’t a satisfactory explanation as to why Gleeson.us is blocked while the lefty titan Kos is not. I’m casting judgment with the ideological bias school. Someone test Corn to see if they’ve nuked all of PJ’s, or just the righties.
[…] Thanks Sean for making these. It seems like they are about to get really popular. Permalink • Trackback URL […]
It’s well established, by people like the OpenNet Initiative, that ALL filtering products constantly block things that are not intentional. So, using Secure Computing or Cisco products you wind up, for instance (if you are say Saudi Arabia) blocking valuable health information in service of making sure your people’s eyeholes aren’t burnt out at the site of an errant boobie. This situation with the DOI is built in to the nature of onlilne censorship.
http://www.opennetinitiative.org/
All blogger.com sites have been blocked so I am certainly among them.
Thanks for the graphic and keep up the hard work of freedom.
Daily Kos *IS* blocked, or it was as of Friday. Kos was blocked before Instapundit was. As I mentioned earlier, the vendor in question has an EXTREMELY crappy initial implementation for categorization. These are not major players in this market.
Good examples: They had groups.google.com categorized as “Free Hosting Service”. Initial access to the USO was blocked due to the category “Tickets”. Within that category, Travelocity was blocked, but Expedia and Orbitz were not. This is not minor-grade bad categorization. It is pathetically, incompetently bad. Access to the AARP was blocked, too. So was the Nation Organization for Women.
They seem to rely almost entirely on USER-SUBMITTED requests for re-categorization, and in this case, it appears that DOI has one or more folks hunched over keyboards reviewing logs of the things that are making it through (in the context of things that are being blocked). So someone is noticing blog accesses that are making it through, submitting those to the vendor, and they are slowly tightening the filters.
I did a brief check on Friday, and only about 35% of Instapundit’s blogroll was blocked (at least for as far as I got down the list). Expect that to rise over time. Hot Air was not blocked at that time. Neither was Ace of Spades.
It’s not political motivation that’s giving these results… it’s just a gobsmackingly poor product, with a too-hasty implementation driven by the public embarrassment of the OIG report. The Secretary of the Interior demanded that *something* be done ASAP, and that’s precisely what happened.
If there’s any political tilt that’s manifesting, I would suspect that it might be showing up because the conservative sites are probably accessed more frequently on the Interior’s network, and therefore the log-reviewing monkeys see the entries sooner and submit them to the vendor.
I work there and I use blog info to solve technical (IT) problems. This makes it harder to do a good job, and while some of your readers don’t want to believe it, some of us do try to do a good job, and we don’t waste a lot of time. (posted from home, not work, obviously)
[…] He also noted that bloggers have reacted angrily to the blog ban, which applies to all but about 100 sites for now. One blogger even created an image that featured Interior’s logo and the word “BANNED!” “These bloggers are a pretty vicious group,” Tipton said jokingly. — Beltway Blogroll […]
In response to the comment from “employee”, I’m also an IT professional working for a DOI agency, and despite the horrible media coverage that report got, we aren’t a bunch of slugs surfing the Internet all day. This filtering is just a slap in the face to those of us who come to work everyday with the intention of doing a good job and not wasting tax payer dollars. As per usual, no one will take the time to deal with the problems; instead we get a screwed-up “fix” that only creates headaches for those who follow the rules. If you haven’t seen it already, check out http://www.fcw.com/article96498-10-17-06-Web for the DOI CIO’s take on blogs. Unbelievable.
Thanks for coming up with the nifty graphic and making it available.
Man, am I glad I don’t work in DOI any more.