LA Times censors newsroom Internet feed

2006-06-20 LAT censors the Internet access

LA Times censors newsroom Internet feed
Peacefire, an anti-censorware site, says that journalists at the LA Times have told them that the LA Times has begun to censor the Internet feed in its newsroom. LA Observed says that the Times told them it uses Websense to restrict reporters' access to the Internet, and that peacefire.org is blocked in the newsroom, along with many other sites.

This is the first example I've heard of a Western newspaper censoring its reporters' Internet feeds. The companies that sell censorware services deliver a notoriously biased and Orwellian system. For example, sites like Peacefire and Boing Boing, which report on the bad judgement in these services and expose their technical failings, are classed as "proxy avoidance."

We get our AP stories from their site online. How are editors in the newsroom suppose to get outside source material like AP?

Follow the links, and it's peacefire.org saying that their site is blocked, along with sites like playboy.com.

But that managers can override the block upon request.

(I worked in a place with limited internet access: two general-use terminals with Internet access, while the desk-top computers we each had only had access to a small intranet; the managers had a work-around so they could get out-of-office mail and Internet access. It was a secure office, and we couldn't even check mail over the internet: they made sure that the Internet-access computers had such low-encryption browsers that e-mail services considered them too insecure for webmail.)

and the BushCo Skull & Boner ChristoFasciost Big-Brother CORPORATE-Profit/propaganda machine.

And I am not exagerating.

Are you saying that the paper is not letting them read news on internet? How do they get news if they can not read what is coming in? It is one of those things that I do not know what all the terms mean I guess.

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