Advocacy Groups Classified Along w/Porn and Gambling By DeVos Department of Education

It’s an Orwellian axiom that “who controls the present, controls the past and who controls the past, controls the future.” There is no better device to control the present and the flow of information than the internet, and the Department of Education apparently is of that opinion as well. It put an interesting muzzle on Public Citizen, which is a website founded by Ralph Nader in the 70’s, devoted to consumer safety. Public Citizen found out that the DOE was using an internet filtering service which classified it in the same category as pornography. Yeah. Daily Beast:

Attempting to access their own website from the Department of Education’s WiFi network, Public Citizen attorneys realized they were being blocked from doing so, with a note popping up that said accessing www.citizen.org was “in violation of your Internet usage policy”

At first, they thought it was a bit of vindictiveness from a department whose secretary, Betsy Devos, they had been targeting—an attempt by the agency to use control over its network to silence critical voices.

In February, they filed a Freedom of Information Act request for more information, but that proved unsuccessful. So they filed a lawsuit instead. And in the course of litigation they discovered the actual answer to the blackout: the Department’s web filtering company was categorizing them as an “advocacy organization”—which they are—and, for some inexplicable reason, advocacy organizations were being placed under the “adult/mature content” categorization, right alongside porn and gambling.

Now the intriguing thing here is that this internet filtering service, Fortinet, classified Public Citizen as an advocacy group, which is perfectly correct, but nobody could proffer a reason why advocacy groups were classified with porn. Could it be that all advocacy groups might be classified along with the porn sites? Roll that concept around in your head for a moment or two. Porn is said to have a pernicious and eroding effect on the moral fiber of the country. And now advocacy groups are put in that league?

Now there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that the DOE told Public Citizen that it would whitelist it’s website, so it would not longer get caught up in it’s security filters, and Public Citizen agreed to drop it’s lawsuit. The bad news is that they’re wondering how many other similar groups are being treated thusly.

“It is possible this problem still exists but we just don’t know about it,” said [attorney Nandan] Joshi. “It is a little bit scarier in that the effects are broader. Some web filterer decides to do a classification and all of the sudden voices are silenced.”

It’s that simple. A web filterer is now a political actor of great power. Very chilling.