What do these web sites have in common? (2)
A couple of days ago, I did a posting in which I listed a number of Left-leaning web sites, asked what they had in common, and promised the answer today.
The answer is that all these Left-leaning political and trade union sites are being blocked by the public wifi system at St Pancras railway station in central London. I know this because one of my techie friends spent some time there checking out access to various sites (I’ve only mentioned a selection of those he found to be blocked).
While I accept that the wifi system is a service provided by a private company who are entitled to block whichever sites they like, the practice raises some important questions:
- Why are so many innocuous sites are blocked?
- Is there a political bias in which sites are blocked?
- Should sites which are blocked have the opportunity to make representations to have the block lifted?
- Should users of the wifi system be advised that blocking is in place and the criteria for such blocking?
August 23rd, 2011 at 9:42 am
On 22nd July, I rechecked the long list of blocked sites and found… all of them had been unblocked. In fact, I couldn’t find a single political site that was blocked. It looks like St Pancras have unblocked dozens of sites, or possibly even changed the default settings on their internet filter. They have never got back to me to explain why they decided to unblock the sites, but I guess this can be claimed as a small victory in the absence of evidence to the contrary.
September 18th, 2011 at 7:13 pm
An update: two days ago I was at St Pancras and found that all of these sites are now blocked again! I’ve emailed my contact to ask why. Maybe they’ve just updated their web filtering package, probably Trend Micro™ InterScan™, and it has reverted to default conservative settings.
Visit the Trend Micro Site Safety Center to see whether Trend Micro considers a website safe, and how it categorises it. I’ve checked many of the political sites blocked at St Pancras and found that, although Trend Micro considers the sites “safe”, they are categorised as “political”, which means, “Sites that discuss or are sponsored by political parties, interest groups, or similar organizations involved in public policy issues; includes non-hate sites that discuss conspiracy theories or alternative views on government”. So it might be that St Pancras are blocking all sites considered to be “political”. It would be interesting to view the full list of such sites, to see both what is present and what is absent.
Some Trend Micro classifications can seem rather perverse. For instance, your site, Roger, is categorised as: Religion: “Sites about popular religions, their practices, or their places of worship”. Coral UK is categorised as: Illegal/questionable: “Sites that promote and discuss how to perpetrate nonviolent crimes, including burglary, fraud, intellectual property theft, and plagiarism; includes sites that sell plagiarized or stolen materials”. This, presumably, is why it is blocked at St Pancras. In contrast, competitors William Hill and Paddy Power are categorised as: Gambling: “Sites that promote or provide information on gambling, including online gambling sites”. Coral (or anyone else) could dispute this categorisation via the “Give feedback” link.
January 8th, 2012 at 3:56 pm
Second update: St. Pancras unblocked all of the above mentioned sites sometime in early October. I’ve checked some of the sites roughly every two weeks since then, and they have remained accessible.
Web filtering at a railway station or any private company is a minor issue compared to filtering at country level. This report, West Censoring East: The Use of Western Technologies by Middle East Censors, 2010-2011, discusses the issues, and mentions the trend for ISPs to obscure the fact that they are even using a filter.