Interior Bans Reading Blogs

A reader pointed me to an FCW article that explains Dept. of Interior policy on reading blogs. The article mentions wasted time and visits to innappropriate sites as part of the reason for a ban on some websites. It seems all blogs are banned, so I guess no USGS folks are reading this at work…

The article explains the ban this way:

Interior banned blogs mostly because of fears of information leaks and the inability to know who is writing a particular blog.

I guess that means there is concern about employees posting comments that leak information to blogs or reading anonymously posted material.

The ban is imposed this way:
Interior installed

an appliance at the agency’s gateway that splits sites into 123 content categories, and then bans sites based on those categories. Individual sites can be appealed, although [Interior’s chief information officer W. Hord] Tipton said he could think of only about 100 sites that have been removed from the ban.