RConversation: U.S. Military censorship?

Whatever gripes we may have, at the moment most Americans have a lot more freedoms and rights than most Chinese. This is without question. But will it stay that way? Not unless we work to keep it so.

In the past few months I've started predicting to friends and colleagues that if trends continue on their current trajectory, in a few more decades there may be little difference between the U.S. and Chinese governments as far as censorship, surveillance, limits on freedom of expression, use of propaganda, and manipulation of the public are concerned. And if that does happen, it will be because the majority of Americans allowed it to happen in the name of national security, fighting terrorism, and protecting our kids from perverts - which are incidentally the same excuses that the Chinese government gives the Chinese public, and which many people there are inclined to accept as well.

Yesterday, Wonkette and Daily Kos reported that U.S. Airforce personnel have been blocked from accessing their sites - while conservative political sites remain accessible. One reader wrote to Wonkette:

It seems that every non-conservative politics website has been blocked by our firewall guys…including your site. The reason it is blocked is because it is a “personal page.” Which means they don’t have a reason to block it … but they want to block it, so they do. This was done recently, just in time for mid-term elections. As I said, it was not only your website, I have gone through lists of liberal sites and most of them are blocked. I’ve also taken the time to go to some conservative sites….none of which are blocked.

Cyber-activist Nart Villeneuve has investigated the technical side of what's happening here, specifically retracing the cause of one error message received by a person with an army e-mail address who tried to access one blog, The Memory Hole. He found that the error message matched one used by a product developed by the company BlueCoat using a URL database from another commercial filtering product, SmartFilter. Nart does not conclude that the blocking was intentional, however:

The facts indicate that http://www.thememoryhole.org/memoryblog/ is blocked, most likely by a BlueCoat appliance configured with SmartFilter 3.0. But the site is not classified as “Extreme;Politics/Religion” but simply “Politics/Religion”? The most likeley explanation is that the military is filtering the “Extreme” category and not using to the most recent version of the SmartFilter database. At some point the Memory Hole was probably doubly classified as Extreme and Politics/Religion and, if the military has not updated their blocking lists, is blocked by the military as a result.

Innocent error? Honest mistake? Certainly, there is plenty of technical-error-deniability- wiggle-room here. But why did this "error" only just manifest itself recently in the runup to a congressional election where the Republicans might lose their majority?

I am reminded of my efforts to transmit politically sensitive TV reports by satellite from Beijing when I was working there for CNN in the 1990's (in the pre-broadband days). There were often conveniently-timed "technical failures" at the state broadcasting facility that controlled our satellite uplink out of China. Those failures always happened when certain kinds of video appeared, and were more common during certain politically sensitive periods. Always plenty of technical deniability. Nobody ever admitted they were censoring anything...