October 11, 2006
Vdare.com Censored by Corporate Software
Many businesses, government agencies, and
universities use software that's designed to block
"inappropriate content." This is called
Censorware. Unfortunately, their
notion of what's inappropriate includes legitimate
political debate. Like Vdare.com for example.
Recently, we've been getting notices that various
readers can't access Vdare.com from work or public
computers, because a software company somewhere "has
a little list."
Steve Sailer reports that both the
Utah State Government and a
Wall Street company have blocked Vdare.com, or
rather, they've bought software that blocks us, and that
both organizations need the information Vdare.com
provides, and that you can't get from the Mainstream
Media.
We got a letter from an American soldier in Kuwait
who reported that Vdare.com is blocked by Army software
as an "advocacy group." (Which is one of the
nicer things that Censorware providers call us,
frequently, like the
SPLC, they call us
a hate group.)
From a security point of view, it's really worrisome
that American troops don't have access to the full
spectrum of the internet, since
their safety may demand access to knowledge of the
latest information, including pages posted by the enemy,
who
definitely qualify as a hate group, and from pages
about firearms training, also frequently blocked.
Peter Brimelow urged readers to
let us know when they
find VDARE.COM is blocked and, if possible, what
filtering software is being used. With reader help, we
have already identified four commercial filters that
blocked us; all have backed off after receiving a
lawyer’s letter.
Censorware companies are sensitive to the fact that
they can be sued; when Peacefire.org, an anti-censorship
test, did a test, they found that that the
companies would block "anti-gay" web pages if they
thought they were from individuals, but not if they were
from conservative foundations like
Focus on the Family,
Concerned Women For America or the
Family Research Council.
The
"homophobic" statements on the
test pages included such things as "
homosexual
activists are vigorously seeking to implement their
agenda. Once again, their ultimate goal is "
gay
marriage." "
The obvious reason for the double standard is that
the foundations have lawyers on staff, and volunteer
lawyers, and the Censorware companies are afraid of
them.
They also recently
unblocked Daily Kos, which had been blocked as "
Profanity,
mature." (They do use a lot of profanity, a search
of their site for the "F-word" finds
fifteen thousand uses of it.
[Link contains a bad word,
15, 000 times.])
There are a number of ways around these things; if
you carry a
Blackberry or
Treo type of portable device, you can read Vdare.com
off that, you can use a variety of proxies, including
Google.com, you can get a program called the
Circumventor that you
can install on your own machine, and then access
anything from other machines.
A while back, we
blogged about an incident where the
Volokh Conspiracy was blocked, possibly because of
the name.
We pointed out this
guide to defeating censorware at BoingBoing.Net. You
might also look at
Peacefire.org, which has been fighting this issue
since the 20th century. 1996, that is, a
long time in internet terms. If you have trouble
understanding the technical details, I suggest you get a
teenage boy to explain it to you.
For obvious reasons,
teenage boys are the world's greatest experts on
circumventing blocking software, but don't ask them
how it is they know all this, or you
may get in serious trouble.
This
corporate blocking software thing is part of a
larger trend of suppressing free speech, which hasn't
affected the internet as much as it might, because the
company that controls internet name regulation is
physically located in the United States, with its
First Amendment traditions. If the UN ever gets control
of it,
look out!
Unfortunately, the other side of that is that this is
private web censorship, taking place even on, for
example,
hotel internet, which you're paying for yourself,
they install blocking programs to avoid the possibility
of offending someone. And private web censorship,
brought on by political correctness, can bypass the
First Amendment.
For Vdare.com to fight back against the Censorware
companies, we need two things.
