Someone who is apparently an employee of the U.S. Department of the Interior has noticed that new network web monitoring software is blocking access to several major blogs.  Now that in and of itself isn’t any cause for alarm - obviously employers have all the authority they need to dictate what sort of websites their employees can visit from their work computers - but what’s curious is the list of websites that are blocked when compared to the list of websites that aren’t.

Blocked Blogs:
Captain’s Quarters
Cox and Forkum
Gates of Vienna
Little Green Footballs
Michael J. Totten
Michelle Malkin
Power Line
Protein Wisdom
Rantings of a Sandmonkey
Roger L. Simon
The Adventures of Chester
The American Thinker
The Belmont Club
The Doctor is In
Wizbang

Blogs not blocked
DailyKos
Democrat Underground
America blog
Atrios.blogspot.com
JuanCole.com
The Huffington Post
Talkingpointsmemo.com

In fact, every blog linked to off of DailyKos seems to work.

Looks like someone in the DoI’s IT department has some political prejudices.

I wonder if this blog is blocked?  About a year ago I was down in the badlands at a visitor’s center and was goofing around on a public computer there with access to the internet.  When I tried to pull up SA I got a message saying that it was blocked because of the content on the site.  Which made sense to me because some of you commenters are pretty foul-mouthed, but then I tried to pull up DailyKos.com (where the posters are every bit as foul-mouthed as you folks are, and worse) and it came up no problem.

I didn’t have time to explore further, but that always struck me as odd.  Making me wonder if the “content” SA was blocked for wasn’t so much profanity as it was conservative political opinions.

Update: From this article it appears as though the DoI is cracking down on recreational use of their computers in general, which is a good thing, except that it doesn’t exactly explain why a bunch of right-wing blogs have been banned while a bunch of left-wing blogs are still accessible.