The liberal advocacy group Public Citizen has worked for nearly 50 years to hold United States government agencies accountable on such non-sexy issues as ethics violations and campaign finance. The group was founded in 1971 by consumer advocate Ralph Nader, but after Nader ran for president on the Green Party ticket in 2000, possibly costing Democrat Al Gore the election, the advocacy group disassociated itself from Nader.
Lately, Public Citizen has hammered away at Donald Trump, filing ethics complaints against top Trump associates and cronies, and even publishing a major report detailing how businesses, religious groups and even charities attempt to win influence with Trump by spending cash at Trump-owned or -branded hotels and resorts.
But according to a report by the Daily Beast published on Thursday, the Trump administration found a way to retaliate against the policy advocacy group—block their website as porn.
To be clear, nothing on the Public Citizen site could be seen as even slightly titillating, except to the most hardcore policy wonk, but at least on the premises of the Trump administration's Department of Education, the in-house WiFi had a filtering system that prevented access to the group’s site because it was classified as “adult/mature” content.
“Users who attempted to access Public Citizen’s website received an error message stating that Public Citizen’s web address was ‘in violation of your Internet usage policy,’” according to a report on the Public Citizen site.
The group filed Freedom of Information Act requests in an attempt to figure out what was going on, and when that didn’t produce results, Public Citizen sued the Department of Education. What it learned as a result was that like many government agencies, the Department of Education farmed out its WiFi services to a company called Fortinet. And for some reason, Fortinet classified “advocacy groups” in the same category as porn—and blocked them.
By September, Public Citizen reached an agreement with the Department of Education to allow its site to be seen by Dept. of Ed employees and visitors, and the group dropped its lawsuit. But the group’s lawyer, Nandan Joshi, said that problems of unwarranted online blocking have not gone away.
“It is possible this problem still exists but we just don’t know about it,” Joshi tole the Daily Beast. “It is a little bit scarier in that the effects are broader. Some web filterer decides to do a classification and all the sudden voices are silenced.”
Photo via Public Citizen
