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UPDATE (1/5): John Aravosis received another statement from the DoD.
I just received a statement from the Pentagon, in the name of Pentagon Press Secretary George Little, in response to our series of stories over the past day about a number of gay and progressive Web sites – including AMERICAblog, Pam’s House Blend, Towleroad, Good As You, Bilerico, The Advocate, HRC’s blog, and the blog of a co-chair of OutServe-SLDN, Josh Seefried – being censored (blocked) by some DOD computers.
From the statement:
In order to help maintain adequate levels of information security in support of DoD policy, some components employ commercial tools that may allow users to visit “news” sites while disallowing pages categorized as “personal sites and blogs”.
No filter is perfect and some sites may have unnecessarily been blocked. The Department Chief Information Officer will work with relevant components to address these situations.
Back-channel communication about resolving this is occurring with the Pentagon, according to John. Now it remains to be seen what comes of this. The major issue is that if the Pentagon has a policy of banning “blogs” then there is no reason why right wing hate blogs run by the Family Research Council and American Family Association should be accessible to service members, but PHB is not. All or nothing.
Surely the work done here (including reporting from the White House and party conventions) is clearly not just “activism” (as if there’s anything wrong with that). Many of the blogs blocked engage in original reporting as well as commentary, and have been credentialed media at political and government events covered by traditional media. Surely they are worthy of consumption by military personnel since the rantings of Ann Coulter or Glenn Beck are.
I guess if you’re black, a lesbian, political and write a blog you’re really a national security threat in the eyes of the Pentagon. And you have to read the DOD response.
This is such a sad, pathetic bit of business that I’d normally laugh it off, but for god’s sake, what is subversive about anything I write here on PHB that the tender souls at the Pentagon need their eyes protected from? Do they think the content will give service members the vapors or make them catch THE GAY? John Aravosis:
We wrote yesterday and today that a variety of gay news sites, including AMERICAblog and Pam’s House Blend are being censored by the Pentagon for being “political, activist, blogs.”
(Straight news site DailyKos is blocked as well.) And that other gay news sites, like Towleroad, GoodAsYou, and Bilerico, are being censored by the Pentagon for belong to the offending category “LGBT.”
Apparently PHB is not gay enough to be blocked, just “activist/political” LOLOLOL If it were only about politics, then what about this?
We also noted that anti-LGBT political activist sites, like the American Family Association (which is so anti-LGBT it’s an officially-designated hate group) and NOM are not blocked by the Pentagon. (The Pentagon also does not block Republican political activist blogs like Red State and Breitbart, or Republican political activists like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Ann Coulter (several of whose sites also have blogs).
But seriously, John not only uncovered this censorship — the Department of Defense’s anti-”LGBT” Web filter category is bad enough — he also found this filter can snare gay anti-bullying and suicide prevention sites in its trap.
The Department of Defense released a tone-deaf and contradictory statement on its Facebook page when this blew up:
We’ve received some questions/comment recently about DOD’s web access policies, and wanted to provide this statement:
The Department of Defense does not block LGBT websites. The pages referenced in several recent articles were denied access based on web filters blocking the “Blog/Personal Pages” category, not the specific sites themselves. While individuals on a DoD system may visit portions of the main websites (i.e., www.towleroad.com, www.AMERICAblog.com), certain additional links/pages – to include personal blogs – are blocked. Personal pages and blogs are blocked in accordance with DoD policy allowing military commanders the option to restrict access to personal pages for operational security reasons.
As John noted, this doesn’t even pass the smell test.
First off, how can some portions of Towleroad and AMERICAblog be visitable, while the “personal blog” portions of those sites are not visitable by military personnel? We don’t have different parts of our site and neither does Towleroad. So what is DOD even talking about?
Second, if the Pentagon doesn’t ban LGBT content, but rather “blogs,” then why did US sailors today discover that the gay newsmagazine, the Advocate – which is not a blog – is banned on military computers found on board the ship the USS John C Stennis (CVN-74), and has been for over a year?
And for that matter, if we are to believe the Pentagon today that AMERICAblog, for example, is simply being blocked for being a blog, then why is the prominent Republican blog, Red State, not blocked on the same Air Force computers that block AMERICAblog? One is gay and progressive, the other is straight and Republican.
Bzzt. Pentagon #FAIL.
I will say, this situation better “self-correct” in terms a filter adjustment. I don’t have a lot of faith that a DOD led by Chuck Hagel will do a damn thing about this problem.
26 Comments
It would be great if Interim Senator Barney Frank (TEMP-MA) had a chance to ask Non-Apologist to James Hormel and potential SecDef nominee Chuck Hagel about this exact issue.
For pete’s sake, Aravosis got invited to the White House blogger sitdown with Barack Obama, and you’ve been there too, right, Pam? Why is the military doing this?
They are probably behind in the repeal of DADT, given the inefficiency of large bureaucracies. And the leadership probably doesn’t care about it enough to prioritize it.
After all, we’re just “those” people.
If I had to guess, I’d guess the Pentagon is does not do the actual set up on its filter… sounds like the same company that does our school district filter – same kind of issues.
Many years ago I heard it is Christianist organization that is a great big company…
Odd decisions it makes…
I know the ACLU has plenty to do, and does amazing work with too little funding, but this seems like an issue that, while it would be a typically long-term project, is right up their alley.
PHB and AmericaBlog are injured parties; mightn’t y’all find some moneyed sponsors to underwrite a legal challenge?
This is not new. When I was using a DoD computer, every so often there would be a blocking of all liberal leaning websites. Usually it happens when the Colonel put in charge of oversight of Department of Defense web traffic is trying to make general. After it happens, doctors and contractors and etc., complain that they can’t do their jobs with those blocks in place so gradually and quietly they become unblocked. This happens three or four times a year. Yeah, it sucks and yes, the Pentagon is run by a bunch of over the top, conservative asshats but what can you do? They have control over all of the access. But just because Aravosis is clutching his pearls over his outrage du jour doesn’t mean it’s anything new. This has been going on at least since 2007.
Now that I think about it, I’m certain I brought this up to the intrepid Mr. Aravosis when I used to spend time in his corner of the internets, in fact during the time I was using a DoD computer for my job. He didn’t seem to find it very newsworthy then though.
The Pentagon has always favored guys like Limbaugh, even though he disses the troops.* They won’t carry Ed Schultz on Armed Forces Radio, but they welcome Limbaugh with open arms.
*A petition to the White House was started last year to get Limbaugh the draft dodger pulled from Armed Forces Radio over his anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-troop comments. The response was to say that “AFN does not censor content”, which is an out-and-out lie.
Yeah. You can get access to Free Republic — which is known to allow its members to post things like the personal information of people they don’t like (such as the manager of Chuy’s, where Jenna Bush got busted for being an underage drinker) — but not to Eschaton or DailyKos, last I’d checked. And that has been the case for years.
Sometimes one can access Kos and Eschaton and even Firedoglake but then the lid comes down again. It’s extremely frustrating to military doctors especially, who get their access too heavily curtailed and they can’t always get the information they need to treat their patients. They complain, the curtain comes up and for a while access is almost entirely unrestricted and then, inevitably, some jarhead who wants to make a name for him/herself comes along and clamps down. I’m certain I mentioned it to Aravosis because I was quite the regular visitor to his site during the period I worked for HJF.
The military needs hate. It cannot perform it’s ultimate duty, which is to kill, without hate.
Don’t think it is limited to DOD computers, either. Could not access FDL yesterday at another fed. computer, while on break.
Different agencies have different levels of censorship, from what I’ve seen. Most non-DoD agencies just censor porn or game sites (in other words, those sites that are major sucks of users’ time and/or bandwidth), but it wouldn’t surprise me if a Bush appointee who managed to “burrow” into his/her particular agency by transferring to a regular (non-presidentially-appointed) Civil Service job was censoring political blogs.
So our tax dollars are restricting/CENSORING! free speech from Gays and Lefties but they let Hate Groups get a captive audience with our troops?
Has anyone asked Obama why?
I hope FDL follows up on this story.
Just what standard does the army use to ban blogs and just how do hate groups manage to avoid being censored?
I would love to hear the army’s official justification.
Given that illegal immigrants can now join the army to get citizenship should CNN be banned I do seem to recall Lou Dobbs lying about illegal immigrants spreading leprosy being broadcast on CNN.
Lies like this and what we normally find on Fox News about Illegals, African Americans, Gays, Women etc that are broadcast on the news spread hate encourage, violence, and help provoke the random shootings by mentally unstable ex solders and mentally unstable civilians that we read about in the news.
The standard for the news and not just army news should be Truth! Yes lies are free speech but lies that encourage hate lead to violence.
If my or anybodies right to live is threatened by lies then those lies threaten my right to life. There are no rights I can enjoy if my right to live is taken away.
C’mon Pam, you’re being far to nice.
To wit, I have been posting here at the FDL for quite some time, and it’s only a matter of time, that the FDL will make this filtered “list.”
Of course, my only claim to fame is that for these past twelve years, I have been writing a daily column for the Chicano Veterans Organization. As such, we are the former Privates, the Corporals, and the Sergeants, and it’s only a matter of time that we will get “upgraded” to the proverbial “terrorist” List, and unbeknownst to us unless a ‘sympathetic soul’ tells us otherwise. And as “racial and ethnics” and long ago opposed both Bush and Cheney’s Wars of Choice, as did the overwhelming majority of America’s minorities, our list-acquisition, will not come as any surprise to us. And more so, since we challenged the Admirals and Generals for turning their backs on the Privates, the Corporals and the Sergeants.
And the only ‘thing’ keeping us off all the “lists” of the 16 allied intelligence-gathering agencies, has been our support for the House Progressive Caucus. Unfortunately, the former Progressives in the House that have since moved over to the Senate, refuse to establish a Senate Progressive Caucus. If and when this Sensate Progressive Caucus is established, these “lists” that are symtommatice of the political gutter, will find their way into the proverbial trash bin of history.
Jaango
I assume FDL is on the banned list. If so FDL loses ad dollars because of this policy. So unless the Army can justify this policy can’t FDL and the other Lefty blogs sue for loss of ad revenue? Or will the Army have to admit that so called news is actually pro war propaganda and the interest of marshaling support for the war is more important than free speech questioning the war?
Just how many out and out hate groups are not banned? Just how many fox news guys who question whether Obama is the President because he was supposedly not born in America, is a secret Muslim, get past the banned list?
Its one thing if this were true but since its not would it not be treason for a solder to say what he heard on Fox News?
Treason during war time is the firing squad.
It’s got nothing to do with being black, other black groups are allowed. It’s about being gay. Just like how NYC bans the word n*gger but not slurs against gays, women, Latinos, or Asians.
How many groups not banned have called for the Red States to leave the Union?
Rush, Glen Beck etc have not said any racial comments?
Comments that promote racism do lead to violence against dark people. It is not only about what is banned but the crap that is not banned.
Pam I do hope you and FDL do jump on this issue and keep following up.
Ah c’mon Pam, admit it, you’ve never been more proud.
The Pentagonal Firewall rises to meet the GFC [Great Firewall of China]. Tweedledee, Tweedledum and dumber.
From my experiance, its like they bought off the shelf software that parents buy to keep thier kids from surfing the adult end of the internet. Even where I work, which is very GLBT friendly and accepting sometimes accessing the Advocate is an issue.
When you find an issue, you gotta make a stink otherwise it will never be addressed.