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Boston Bans Boing Boing From City Wi-Fi
DrFlounder writes "The city of Boston has apparently blocked access to Boing Boing on the municipal Wi-Fi. This is possibly due to the popular blog's known Mooninite sympathies." Update: 4/22 13:11 GMT by KD : Seth Finkelstein did some research and posted an explanation of the blockage to his blog. "'Arbitrary and capricious' seems the relevant characterization."
Someone in Boston WiFi area, try the Google English->English translation:u =boingboing.net/
http://www.google.com/translate?langpair=en%7Cen&
Not you should have to...fucking puritans. I thought the NorthEast these days was supposed to be the liberal ones? Is liberal really that far from Communism? Also, what does the Terms of Service say anyway? Pigs.
boingboing finds itself frequently banned. One reason is their frequent links to circumventing censorship. Another reason is that they sometimes post NSFW links.
The fact that the government is censoring adults is offensive. But then again, Boston has had a reputation of puritanism.
If by "People took exception to being insulted" you mean "they thought some lights were bombs" then yes
While I appreciate your comment that they have the opportunity to throw them out at the next election that opportunity will remain just that and nothing else. To be voted out of office in MA takes some serious doing. For an example look at their senior senitor the Honorable Edward M Kennedy, he's often publicly intoxicated, and has even been involved in fleeing the scene of an accident where his campaign worker Mary Jo Kopechne was killed as a result of drowning after the car he was driving was driven off a bridge. I feel all their jobs are safe after all being a drunken murderer isn't enough to keep you from getting reelected.
Before the government can use any power they must have had that power granted to them, at least in the US. Please explain where Boston has derived the right to censor their wifi system. I certainly hope you don't respond with something about the "public welfare."
To put it bluntly, the courts have stated and ordered that libraries do not have the right to implement filtering software of their free Internet connections. While you don't think the "government is obliged to use the taxpayer's money to carry your speech and bring it out to the people" the federal courts in the US disagree. If a library is going to use public funding to support their free Internet connections, they do not have the right to filter them. Whether you like it or not, it has been decided. This ruling obviously should apply to the city of Boston as well.
I think Boing Boing needs to get a lawyer and get to suing.
If they're going to sue, they need to start with those jokers at Smartfilter.
They use it at my workplace, and it blocks things completely at random. BoingBoing posted some critical articals on Smartfilter and instantly got on their shit list -- Boing Boing is now permanently blocked as "nudity", a blatantly false category designed to get people in trouble for even trying to view it.
If you report the inaccuracy, they claim to fix it, only to ignore it and keep them blocked.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if Boston was just using Smartfilter and this is just a symptom of a much larger problem. Smartfilter is, IIRC, the official filter of choice for the US and Iranian governments for blocking naughty content from their masses -- ever since the Republicans managed to con their way into forcing all library machines into being filtered ("Think of the Children" covering the fact that Libraries are poor people's only way to get on the net) Smartfilter has been a bit of a fun toy to play with.
In the middle of the 2006 elections, for example, out of the blue Liberal blogs and Political Canidate websites in Swing States suddenly found themselves blocked as being "curse words" or "mature" or "forums" or other similarly flimsy excuses. Pretty sneaky -- get a censorship filter installed where poor people (who typically vote Democratic) are going to be forced to go through it, then just start randomly blocking political "dissidents" that you don't like. And since Smartfilter has a very, very strict policy (now, anyway) about not REMOVING, only RECATEGORIZING websites... well, yeah.
No, the local governments grant the ISPs a monopoly usually, so they should be held to the same standards as a government service would be. I dunno where you live, but where I am, we have one choice for broadband and one choice only. And lemme tell ya, it sucks. I recently discovered they charge an extra $60 a month for the EXACT same service, just without the 'you are not allowed to run a server' clause in the TOS. But yea, unless I want dial-up, that's my only option.
Was any authority or elected official involved? Highly unlikely.
Highly likely. The decision to block inappropriate sites on the municipal wifi was almost certainly made by such an official. Did that official decide to block boing-boing? Probably not, but it is a consequence of that person's decision that this government sanctioned censorship (for whatever reasons the site is being censored, as you point out we don't know) is happening.
Really folks, there is utterly no information here except that some filter somewhere blocked one page on Boingboing's website.
Hardly the First Amendment case that's being suggested and debated.
"In 1998, a United States federal district court in Virginia ruled that the imposition of mandatory filtering in a public library violates the First Amendment of the U.S. Bill of Rights. [Mainstream Loudon v. Board of Trustees of the Loudon County Library, 24 F. Supp. 2d 552 (E.D. Va. 1998)]" (source).
This filtering is almost certainly unconstitutional, based on the same arguments used in that case.