Unintentional Humor From the Federal Bureaucracy (restricting blogs)

[The Straight Story]

Unintentional Humor From the Federal Bureaucracy

By Ralph Smith

10/16/2006

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Bureaucracies often do not like change. Decisions have to be made, policies have to be written and the organization has to accommodate new people and new ideas. In other words, new technology has benefits but it also means work for someone. Rejecting change and reacting to change by trying to make it go away seems to be part of human nature in general and part of large organizations in particular.

Several years ago, David Orr, a well-known federal human resources official and a popular speaker at human resources conferences, gave a speech in Washington, DC. He compared the introduction of the internet in government offices to what happened with the telephone in earlier decades. Agencies tried to restrict the use of the telephone and he cited government regulations intended to restrict telephone usage by Uncle Sam's employees so that they would not be wasting time chatting with friends and relatives with the new invention.

....

The action by the Department of the Interior has quickly become the source of a vast number of stories on the internet. The Federal Times certainly noticed the action and reported that, initially at least, conservative political websites seemed to be the target of the censors. The internet was soon jumping with lists of sites deemed inappropriate for the eyes of Interior employees and the list continued to grow throughout the day and over the weekend. (See a list from the Gates of Vienna web site.)

Humor, of course, is an effective tool and the Interior Department censors have been an inspiration for some artists. See, as one example, this posting as well as the various forms of the suggested logo for the Interior Department.

One employee of the agency wrote about the attempt to start blocking sites: "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....Don’t attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence."

Actually, in our experience, the Department of the Interior is not the first agency to try and restrict access to information. Several months ago, FedSmith.com ran a story about an employee of the Bureau of Prisons who received a large settlement in a complaint against the agency. Perhaps it was coincidental, but a few days later, subscribers from BOP could no longer receive the daily newsletter. In fact, the agency blocked any e-mail from our site directed to agency employees.


http://www.fedsmith.com/articles/articles.showarticle.db.php?intArticleID=1062


Blocked Blogs:
Captain’s Quarters
Cox and Forkum
Gates of Vienna
Little Green Footballs
Michael J. Totten
Michelle Malkin
Power Line
Protein Wisdom
Rantings of a Sandmonkey
Roger L. Simon
The Adventures of Chester
The American Thinker
The Belmont Club
The Doctor is In
Wizbang

Blogs not blocked
DailyKos
Democrat Underground
America blog
Atrios.blogspot.com
JuanCole.com
The Huffington Post
Talkingpointsmemo.com

In fact, every blog linked to off of DailyKos seems to work.

http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2006/10/uncle-sam-blocks-gates-of-vienna-among.html

[acmejack]

1. Not the dreaded Democrat Underground!