Scott’s DiaTribes is looking for federal government employees to give him a hand.

If you work for any federal department, please read his post and get back to him.

Seriously though, I’d like those same civil servants who advised Dave over at Galloping Beaver that several progressive blogging sites or Liberal blogging sites that weren’t banned 2 weeks ago but now are would go and check if they can access some of the more popular right-wing conservative sites. If this is a total blogging ban on all blogs, then I don’t particularly have an issue - its probably one of those “prevent workers from being less productive on work hours” thing. If the right-wing blogs CAN be accessed however, and its a targeted blog ban, then this smacks of nothing but censorship.

It appears the current banned blogs are on different platforms so it isn’t a question of Blogspot being banned or just Typepad or Wordpress.  The department this was noticed in was Agriculture. A government IT tech comments at one of the blocked blogs:

As a government IT guy, I regularly monitor usage, and if I see lots of visits to certain websites that appear non-work related, I’ll block them. (like I blocked Facebook for one computer last week, user spending a little too much time there)

To note, I used to get regular visits from that department too, but haven’t seen them in a while. Could be more of a mass block, not just Prog blogs.

Any testing done with popular Blogging Tories?

No one knows if this is arbitrary, individual or concerted. If you can help Scott out, please do.

The Galloping Beaver
Bread and Roses
Calgary Grit
BigCityLib