RochesterTurning blocked by County Government
Geez someone is pissed. It is one thing to be blocked by China but Monroe County? Land of the free, home of the brave?
A concerned reader alerted us that Monroe County has blocked their access to RochesterTurning but not other websites. Of particular note is that local conservative websites are not blocked. We are talking about computers managed by the County for employees. They checked other computers with the same result.
Look, I don’t know what the County Internet policy is. I suspect that like other places there is a reasonable level of “surfing” allowed with the usual exceptions (”Adult”, chat, gambling etc)
The question is why is RochesterTurning blocked and not conservative sites?
I think the answer is obvious.
Someone want to do a FOIA for policy and all correspondence pertaining to determining which sites to block? How about a FOIA on exactly what sites are being blocked?
I mean is Monroe County - China?
Anyone else out there having problems?
Related posts:
could you just clarify this a bit.
Do you mean the county government as in folks on the computers who work for the county can’t use it or do you mean more such as the library system etc.
don’t forget Maggie wants to control the local wireless internet through connections with frontier.
County employees or computers managed by the County. I’ll update the post above.
don’t forget Maggie wants to control the local wireless internet through connections with frontier.
She has to, rg. Otherwise some people might visit adult sites. We can’t have that in Monroe County.
only maggie can date a supervisor while she is married. Others must attend one of the new mega churches in greece and be lectured on the need to obey authority
Look on the bright side — churches are non profits so they can’t get COMIDA tax abatements.
I am shocked, *shocked* that you would compare Monroe County to China.
That hardly seems fair, honest, or truthful.
After all, every article I’ve read talks about how fiscally well managed China is.
I find this really troubling. Does anyone know the official policy regarding blocking employee access to sites? Who decides, what are the criteria, etc?
Probably became policy after Cheryl Dinolfo’s boy got caught blogging on company time.
It’s good to be so bad you’re blocked. Keep up the good work RT! Just think - you know the connection still works in Queen Magpies office!
…which is interesting come to think of it. D&C cracks down at the same time Monroe County blocks. Is this a co-inkidink?
If MonroeRising and RochesterConservative are blocked, and the D&C Forums for that matter, then there’s consistency. However, if RT is arbitrarily blocked, that seems like it should be illegal, but I’m no lawyer.
Can you imagine if the Bush federal gov’t blocked access to HuffPost and DailyKos on all federal computers? How is this any different?
He didn’t get caught blogging on RT did he?
That exactly the point. CONSISTENCY
Block all or none - there is a decision point here and the question is how was that decision made.
FOIA anyone?
I’m not suer I think the consistency issues really gets to the matter. Although any restrictions need to be fair and equal, the real questions is whether there ought to be restrictions.
Once you start imposing political restrictions isn’t it easy then to impose them on the library system or any place else where dissent might breakout or be seen by the public.
I have the FOIA app prepared but I don’t have a fax machine and MC doesn’t obey the guidelines set forth by the NYS committee on Open Government to allow for email submission. So if anybody has a fax machine, drop me a line. nickcoffee@gmail.com
You can submit FOIA requests to the county online at:
http://www.monroecounty.gov/Image/FOILapp(1).pdf
The page containing this link is:
http://www.monroecounty.gov/communications-index.php
This is the electronic form for the FOIA but there is no email address to submit it to. The email address on the page of the communications dept is a dead end and no responses result. However somebody was kind enough to submit it for me.
You might want to advise your readers that, if they go through google reader (or other similar resources) they’re not blocked from reading (mostly). You can’t comment from there, but you can still read from there.
[...] a weird twist, Rochesterturning - this blog - apparently is blocked from County Government computers. What makes this wrong is that other local blogs - on both sides of the spectrum are not. [...]
I am bringing this back up because I finally received a response to my FOIA request on internet policies. I requested
“All documents, e-mails, and memoranda , electronic or paper, describing or modifying policy with
regard to internet access on computers or computer networks owned or operated by Monroe county”
I received in response a meager 2 pages of the county’s internet policy.
I’ll spare you the “Objective” but here is the crux of it:
When the County grants an employee/customer Internet access or an E-mail account.itis the
responsibility of the employee to adhere to the following guidelines:
o E-mail must be used in a professional manner.
o Messages must not be threatening, insulting, obscene, abusive, or derogatory.
o Messages must not include remarks that constitute sexual harassment.
o Chain letters are illegal and must not be transmitted through E-Mail.
o Employees are responsible for saving any E-Mail that they want to keep permanently.
o Messages must not involve personal sales or solicitation or be associated with any forprofit
outside business activity.
o Messages must not involve personal not-fur-profit solicitations.
o Messages must not potentially embarrass Monroe County.
o Your files must be housecleaned at least once a month, deleting any old E-Mail and
lor downloaded information that you have saved.
o For security reasons your passwords should not be given to anyone else.
o Internet must not be used for the propagation of computer viruses.
o Internet must not be used for personal recreational activities (online games).
o There should be no participation in non-business Internet chat groups.
o As a security precaution, you must not leave your workstation signed onto E-Mail or
the Internet and unattended for a long period oftime (or overnight). You should log
off the network when not in use and power down at the end of the day.
o Employee/customer Internet access may be subject to filtering and will be monitored.
o Because the Internet is a collection of computer networks with no single central
authority over information consistency, data is subject to inaccuracies.
Reporting of Security Violations:
Any employee’s/customer’s suspected unauthorized use of E-Mail and/or the Internet
should be reported immediately to the agency/department head, County Human Resources
Director or the head of the customer’s Human Resources Department, and the County IS
Director.
Compliance:
Any violation(s) of this policy may result in disciplinary action up to and including
termination. At a minimum, E-Mail and/or Internet service may be terminated for the
employee/customer.
I can’t necessarily find any real disagreement with this document, other than we all know well that it has been violated by county employees in the past. The problem here is that given my request, you would expect a much much broader response. I have to call into question that this is the only information that falls under my rather broad description.