| By Clem Guttata
Earlier today, Carnacki noted a Charleston Gazette article about state employee access to West Virginia Blue. Reporter Alison Knezevich provides even more background at the Squawk Box blog:
Chief technology officer Kyle Schafer confirmed today that the site had been inaccessible to some employees, but says it was a mistake caused by filtering software. Some agencies had asked the office to block "travel sites," Schafer told me.
A Web site with a very similar address - www.wvblue.com - fell under the travel category (though it doesn't look like a travel site).
Schafer says cabinet secretaries can ask his office to block certain kinds of sites, but it's rare that an individual site is targeted. Usually, they ask to block broad categories, like social media sites (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc.)
I've been trying really hard to reconstruct the sequence of events required for the InterMountain website to be miscategorized as a travel site and then manually entered incorrectly into a list of sites to block.
Simply put: this explanation does not add up.
What I'd like to know...
Alison Knezevich is off to a great start on uncovering something is amiss. But, W.Va. CTO Kyle Schafer leaves a lot of questions unanswered:
1. Which agencies requested blocking of "travel sites"? When did they request it? (Question for those agencies: why did they request it?)
2. Has any agency requested the blocking of individual sites so far this year? If so, which agency requested what site to be blocked (and when)?
3. When one agency requests blocking of a specific site or category of sites, does that block access for all other agencies?
4. What is the process for identifying what sites are in what category? Does the state categorize sites itself or does it use a third-party service that categorizes sites? Is it done through a individual check of each site or through automated keyword matching?
5. What criteria was used to categorize the InterMountain property development company as a travel site? (The word travel appears nowhere on the site.)
6. What is the quality control process to make sure that websites are properly categorized?
I am reluctant to make any guesses about why access to our site was blocked. But, the provided explanation suggests a level of incompetence that is troubling unto itself. |
