About 10 years ago, a friend of mine said that governments will fear the Internet because it is a bastion of truth. Now, we see corporations attempting to privatize (read: piratize) it, many governments shutting portions down, and our own government using it to spy on citizens. It's not surprising at all that when government officials are either held accountable for their actions or are outed in nefariousness by the Internet community, the first thing they want to do is shut down the highway to truth and accountability.

These are a few of the many, many reasons that the Internet should be kept free and clear of either corporate or government influence. Censorship only allows criminals to continue in criminal activity. It is so sad to see our nation slide into the very activities for which we lambasted China and Russia for only a scant decade ago. If torture, extraordinary rendition, political imprisonment, censorship and domestic spying were so bad when Russia and China did it, why is it suddenly so good for our government to be doing exactly the same things?

The fact is that there is no reasonable answer for that question. Any decent, honest, patriotic American would demand a return to open and honest government. Again, criminal activity in the government can only exist in secrecy. The Internet is but one yardstick and goad to ensure that elected officials remain honest and true to the Constitution. There are fewer and fewer avenues left -- let us not allow this tool to be infringed upon any further.

Dear Kombiz,

GovTrends is the official website vendor for Nebraska's Third District Congressman Adrian Smith. As a disclaimer, we are a bi-partisan technology vendor providing web services to many congressional offices. We are very concerned with the misunderstanding that has been brought to our attention by Congressman Smith's office.

We were contacted by the congressman's office regarding the problem bloggers on Blogspot were having linking to the congressman's website. Upon further investigation we discovered our servers were set by default to block all referring traffic from Blogspot due to the proliferation of spammers. So, in effect, this 'blocking' of Blogspot is affecting all of the websites on our server - both Democrat and Republican. To be clear, neither us nor our client were aware of the blocking being done prior to today (we have over 2000 different websites on our blacklist that we download from gotroot.com) and we apologize for any inconvenience this has caused Blogspot bloggers.

We are currently researching a solution that will relieve this situation as soon as possible. If we feel that Blogspot does not pose a spamming threat to any of our clients’ websites or our servers, we will allow its incoming traffic. Again, we apologize for the inconvenience this has caused and hope to have this resolved soon.

Best Regards,
GovTrends
Website Design Studio

This afternoon I received a posting from a firm called GovTrends. I wanted to verify. Sorry, I don't take them at face value. Plus, it was pretty pathetic that, once again, Smith's people just chose to not speak with me. At the same time, I had been waiting for this to happen. The tech that found the problem had even said they would try to pull this, but not really believable.

I went ahead and called them, after seeing that their site said:

GovTrends is a full service web studio and online strategy firm focused on serving high profile political and corporate clients.

Whenever I see the word "Stategy", that comes to close to being a "persuasion" firm, like Targeted Creative Communications.

They verified they run websites for other members of Congress. I asked who they were, they refused to tell me, saying "it's confidential". Doesn't matter that they are being paid with my tax dollars to set up and manage official government websites. Doesn't matter that every dollar spent by members of Congress through their office is public information, and hence, so is who they are giving it to. That arguement didn't really budge the guy. He just told me to send an email request, then, and they'd do some tests first. That perked up my interest. In other words, were they going to fix it? How, I don't know, but his refusal to be cooperative in verifying what he said sure didn't sit right.

He said, as you can see, their servers are set by default. He kept on wanting to tell me about some site on the internet that tells about the biggest spammers, and that blogspot.com was one of them. I told him I didn't care about that.

So, we have Smith's office continuing to refuse to comment on this, and a provider wanting us to take them at face value.

So let's look at some of the clients that they serve, as noted on their site:

- JP Morgan
- NYC Health
- Sirius Satellite
- Snapple
- Godiva Chocolatier
- WebMD
- Wharton: University of Pennsylvania
- The Bahamas

So far, their own site and the ones I've tested that I can see they run have all been accessible through Blogspot.com. So, that leads to the question: Is this automatic blocking only occuring on servers for members of Congress? Is that even believable? And just how many members of Congress do they actually work for since they're not providing a list?

Hello,
We, here at GovTrends, want to give you and your readers an accurate explanation of what is happening with the blogspot refer links.

Servers have different requirements - some are less strict then others. Due to strict security and high volume of “spider” generated spam congressional websites receive, we use gotroots.com as they are reputable for providing security config files. In the case of the “blacklist config” file, line 7060 - blocks refers from " #SecFilterSelective HTTP_Referer|ARGS www.*\.blogspot due to spamming issues. Add the link http://www.joinadrian.com/ to your blogspot account and you will see the site. It's a different server, different vendor, runs different technology, just more prone to spam. Again, If we feel that Blogspot does NOT pose a spamming threat to ANY of our congressional clients' websites, we will allow its incoming traffic. This decision is ours as our number one priority is security for all our congressional clients. Again, we apologize for the inconvenience this has caused. Feel free to email gotroots and ask them why they added blogspot on their spam list.

Best Regards,
GovTrends
Network Support

Hello,
Our role at GovTrends is to provide our client's on both sides of the aisle websites that are safe and accessible by everyone on the Internet.

We, here at GovTrends, want to give you and your readers an accurate explanation of what is happening with the Blogspot refer links.

Servers have different requirements - some are less strict then others. There are dozens of servers hosting congressional website, each with different requirements because of various website vendors and differing technologies.

How does this affect congressional websites? Every congressional website has email forms that can, with enough effort, be highjacked by spam robots to be used to send spam through congressional servers to random people. Our goal is to minimize this type of spam by blocking potential threats.
Due to strict security requirements and high volume of “spider” generated spam congressional websites receive, we use the blacklist definitions of gotroots.com as they are reputable for providing security config files. In the case of the “blacklist config” file, line 7060 - blocks refers from " #SecFilterSelective HTTP_Referer|ARGS www.*\.blogspot due to spamming issues.
Add the link http://www.joinadrian.com/ to your blogspot account and you will see the site. It's a different server, different vendor, runs different technology, just more prone to spam.

We are currently unblocking blogspot temperately for our congressional clients, and will monitor refers and traffic. Should these refer links cause harm or increased amounts of spider spam, we will review and block the http refers again WITHOUT WARNING. This decision is ours as our number one priority is security for all our congressional clients. Again, we apologize for the inconvenience this has caused.

Best Regards,
GovTrends
Network Support