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If you've come over from TomDispatch after reading my article there, I am fairly certain of at least one thing (besides your good taste in blogs): You don't work for the State Department.
The State Department continues to block web sites within our offices such as Tom's because they may contain content from Wikileaks, which although available all over the web, is still considered classified by the State Department. If you try to access a forbidden site, you get a message like this (click on the graphic below and it will enlarge so that your computer at home will look like a real US Government computer. Pretend you're a real diplomat!):
The doesn't-make-sense part is that the State firewall does not block mainstream web sites that have a lot more Wikileaks content than Tom's. Examples include the Washington Post, The New York Times and the Guardian UK. All of these sites have and continue to include Wikileaks material that is otherwise still classified within Foggy Bottom.
Just to make sure our quotient of irony stays at Defcon 99, the State Department plans to spend $19 million on breaking Internet censorship overseas. State says it will give $19 million dollars to efforts to evade Internet controls in China, Iran and other authoritarian states which block online access to "politically sensitive material." Michael Posner, the Assistant Secretary of State in charge of human rights, said that the funding would support technology to identify what countries are trying to censor and "redirecting information back in that governments have initially blocked; this is a cat-and-mouse game. We're trying to stay one step ahead of the cat through email or posting it on blogs or RSS feeds or websites that the government hasn't figured out how to block."
© 2023 Peter Van Buren
If you've come over from TomDispatch after reading my article there, I am fairly certain of at least one thing (besides your good taste in blogs): You don't work for the State Department.
The State Department continues to block web sites within our offices such as Tom's because they may contain content from Wikileaks, which although available all over the web, is still considered classified by the State Department. If you try to access a forbidden site, you get a message like this (click on the graphic below and it will enlarge so that your computer at home will look like a real US Government computer. Pretend you're a real diplomat!):
The doesn't-make-sense part is that the State firewall does not block mainstream web sites that have a lot more Wikileaks content than Tom's. Examples include the Washington Post, The New York Times and the Guardian UK. All of these sites have and continue to include Wikileaks material that is otherwise still classified within Foggy Bottom.
Just to make sure our quotient of irony stays at Defcon 99, the State Department plans to spend $19 million on breaking Internet censorship overseas. State says it will give $19 million dollars to efforts to evade Internet controls in China, Iran and other authoritarian states which block online access to "politically sensitive material." Michael Posner, the Assistant Secretary of State in charge of human rights, said that the funding would support technology to identify what countries are trying to censor and "redirecting information back in that governments have initially blocked; this is a cat-and-mouse game. We're trying to stay one step ahead of the cat through email or posting it on blogs or RSS feeds or websites that the government hasn't figured out how to block."
If you've come over from TomDispatch after reading my article there, I am fairly certain of at least one thing (besides your good taste in blogs): You don't work for the State Department.
The State Department continues to block web sites within our offices such as Tom's because they may contain content from Wikileaks, which although available all over the web, is still considered classified by the State Department. If you try to access a forbidden site, you get a message like this (click on the graphic below and it will enlarge so that your computer at home will look like a real US Government computer. Pretend you're a real diplomat!):
The doesn't-make-sense part is that the State firewall does not block mainstream web sites that have a lot more Wikileaks content than Tom's. Examples include the Washington Post, The New York Times and the Guardian UK. All of these sites have and continue to include Wikileaks material that is otherwise still classified within Foggy Bottom.
Just to make sure our quotient of irony stays at Defcon 99, the State Department plans to spend $19 million on breaking Internet censorship overseas. State says it will give $19 million dollars to efforts to evade Internet controls in China, Iran and other authoritarian states which block online access to "politically sensitive material." Michael Posner, the Assistant Secretary of State in charge of human rights, said that the funding would support technology to identify what countries are trying to censor and "redirecting information back in that governments have initially blocked; this is a cat-and-mouse game. We're trying to stay one step ahead of the cat through email or posting it on blogs or RSS feeds or websites that the government hasn't figured out how to block."