Finally, we have a response from the Fletcher administration on their blog ban.
Mark Routledge, Deputy Commissioner of the state’s Commonwealth Office of Technology (COT), which manages internet service for the state government, told me that the state had not targeted specific sites. Rather, they’d made a decision to block state employees from viewing the entire category of blogs.
The decision was originally instituted yesterday evening at 5 PM, Routledge said, and they made “an adjustment” at 7 AM. No adjustments had been made since then, he said — contrary to the experience of some readers of TPMm and the Bluegrass Report who wrote in as sites were blocked throughout the morning. “We’re not sitting here, seeing where people are going and blacklisting specific sites,” Routledge said.
And Routledge wanted to spare me any hurt feelings. “We didn’t want you to think that you were being singled out,” he said, explaining his decision to call me back. The same went for the Bluegrass Report, which he referred to as “Bluegrass something or other.”
Here’s how he explained the decision.
Routledge said the state uses internet filtering software called Webwasher, which involves a national database. The database sorts web content into 55 categories, one of which is blogs/news groups. In the last couple of weeks, Routledge said, he and others at COT decided to block certain categories, one of which was blogs. (The others were “entertainment/motion pictures, auctions/classified ads, humor/comics, and ‘malicious websites,’ sites with malicious source code,” according to Routledge.)
Routledge emphasized that they made the decision to block the category of blogs, not specific sites. And it was his office’s decision to block blogs, he insisted — not the governor’s. The COT passed it “along to the cabinet secretaries, and the decision was made that it was all right.”
But, but… why blogs?
He didn’t have a pat answer for that. State computers were for business use only, he said.
But I pointed out that the state wasn’t blocking news sites.
Yes, he said, but the papers are more likely to have “some value, some relevance to somebody’s job.” Blogs are generally aligned with certain “interest groups.”
Before I could respond, he said “I don’t want to get into a philosophical discussion about whether blogs are news or not.” His office was trying to prevent “sharing information of things that are not relevant to work.” And besides, he said, if an employee felt that a certain blocked blog would be relevant to work, he or she could just go to his orher supervisor to grant access.
So that’s his story and he’s sticking to it. It leaves a few questions unanswered. For starters, why certain blogs were available earlier (though after 7 AM), and were unavailable later in the day. And why a number of blogs (see Mark’s tally here) seem unaffected by the block. But according to Routledge, their internet filtering service Webwatcher is to blame for that, not the governor’s office.
Update: The Lexington Herald Leader has their story out on the ban.
Later Update: I incorrectly identified the state’s monitoring system as Webwatcher — it is Webwasher.
