Nebraska Democratic Party: "Smith Watch" Gets Under Congressman's Skin?

"Smith Watch" Gets Under Congressman's Skin?

Nov 05, 10:19 AM CST

Lisa Hannah, publisher of Smith Watch, seems to have hit a nerve.

It seems that Congressman Adrian Smith’s staff has deemed Lisa’s blog too dangerous to link to his official, government-financed website. She explains the situation better than anyone, so I highly recommend you read this post to learn the details.

Lisa raises some great questions:

The question, then, is WHY would Adrian Smith and his staff do such a thing? Just what about a link to his Congressional website from mine is a concern to them? Could they actually be nervous about the things I expose about Smith on a regular basis?

I don’t know about you, but I’m very interested to hear Smith’s answers.

Note: In the interest of fairness, I should point out that Congressman Smith’s web firm has responded in the comments. I recommend you read their side of the story –– as well as Lisa’s response. –evh

– by Eric Van Horn | Send this to a friend

Lisa Hannah for Congress!

RUN, LISA, RUN!
— Brian T. Osborn Nov 05, 01:08 PM CST #
To whom it may concern,

GovTrends is the official website vendor for Nebraska’s Third District Congressman Adrian Smith. As a disclaimer, we are a bi-partisan technology vendor providing web services to many congressional offices. We are very concerned with the misunderstanding that has been brought to our attention by Congressman Smith’s office.

We were contacted by the congressman’s office regarding the problem bloggers on Blogspot were having linking to the congressman’s website. Upon further investigation we discovered our servers were set by default to block all referring traffic from Blogspot due to the proliferation of spammers. So, in effect, this ‘blocking’ of Blogspot is affecting all of the websites on our server – both Democrat and Republican. To be clear, neither us nor our client were aware of the blocking being done prior to today (we have over 2000 different websites on our blacklist that we download from gotroot.com) and we apologize for any inconvenience this has caused Blogspot bloggers.

We are currently researching a solution that will relieve this situation as soon as possible. If we feel that Blogspot does not pose a spamming threat to any of our clients’ websites or our servers, we will allow its incoming traffic. Again, we apologize for the inconvenience this has caused and hope to have this resolved soon.

Best Regards,
GovTrends
Website Design Studio
— GovTrends Web Studio Nov 05, 02:24 PM CST #
I got the same thing. It happened because I tried to get some information and a response from Smith’s spokesman, Charles Isom. He did not take my call, and did not respond to my message. Instead, I got this firm to contact me. In trying to verify what they were saying, I asked for a list of the congressional sites they run. They refused initially, saying it was “confidential”. They then said I’d have to submit my request in writing. I did just that, but still have heard nothing. I had check several random websites of members of Congress well before I ever posted. None of them ever had a problem being linked from blogspot. The person I spoke to at this firm said that they are worried about “spam”. That doesn’t make sense if it’s an informational site. I’ll be doing more followup and will write what I know when I know it, but so far this is the type of response that was predicted: Blame the service provider. BUt before they took over, there were no issues with connecting to Smith’s site.
— Lisa Hannah Nov 05, 03:49 PM CST #
Hello,

Our role at GovTrends is to provide our client’s on both sides of the aisle websites that are safe and accessible by everyone on the Internet.

We, here at GovTrends, want to give you and your readers an accurate explanation of what is happening with the Blogspot refer links.

Servers have different requirements – some are less strict then others. There are dozens of servers hosting congressional website, each with different requirements because of various website vendors and differing technologies.

How does this affect congressional websites? Every congressional website has email forms that can, with enough effort, be highjacked by spam robots to be used to send spam through congressional servers to random people. Our goal is to minimize this type of spam by blocking potential threats.

Due to strict security requirements and high volume of “spider” generated spam congressional websites receive, we use the blacklist definitions of gotroots.com as they are reputable for providing security config files. In the case of the “blacklist config” file, line 7060 – blocks refers from ” #SecFilterSelective HTTP_Referer|ARGS www.*\.blogspot due to spamming issues.

Add the link http://www.joinadrian.com/ to your blogspot account and you will see the site. It’s a different server, different vendor, runs different technology, just more prone to spam.

We are currently unblocking blogspot temperately for our congressional clients, and will monitor refers and traffic. Should these refer links cause harm or increased amounts of spider spam, we will review and block the http refers again WITHOUT WARNING. This decision is ours as our number one priority is security for all our congressional clients. Again, we apologize for the inconvenience this has caused.

Best Regards,
GovTrends
Network Support
— GovTrends Web Studio Nov 06, 07:34 AM CST #