http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,37425,00.html
Is the FBI blocking privacy-equipped browsers from its website?
The question goes unanswered a week after users of a commercial
privacy service found themselves unable to access the Federal Bureau
of Investigation's fbi.gov site.
"You can't access fbi.gov if you have a Freedom 'nym' running,"
confirmed Dov Smith, spokesman for Zero-Knowledge Systems, which runs
Freedom.net, the privacy service affected by the problem.
Zero-Knowledge began an investigation after postings by users
of Freedom mentioned the problem last week on the "cypherpunks"
mailing list, a popular discussion forum for privacy and encryption
enthusiasts.
The company and the FBI have yet to find a likely cause, which could
be political or technical in nature.
...
Just as it told Zero-Knowledge representatives, the FBI said it has
no answers as to the cause of the problem but in general it would
never seek to block access to its site.
"I can't speak to whether or not there's a problem, but I can tell you
on our part there's no intention to deny anybody," said FBI spokesman
Rex Tomb. "That I'm aware of, there's no attempt to block anybody
from looking at the FBI's Web page and there's no incentive for us
to do it," said Tomb.
He added that the FBI site has never blocked any kind of Internet
traffic. "The more people that can see that page the more we like
it. That's the whole reason we have it."
"I'm going out on a limb here -- could it be that this software makes
it difficult to interface with firewall or other considerations?" Smith
said.
He said Zero Knowledge is hoping to collaborate with FBI engineers
to explore all possible causes from an intentional "blockage" to a
so-far unprecedented technical problem with Freedom software.
Commentary:
"Rex Tomb" as the FBI spokesman? Doesn't this seem like a made-up name?
The quoting in the last two paragraphs is confusing. Smith is the ZKS
spokesman. He is unlikely to be the person who criticized the software
as being difficult to interface with firewalls. Presumably that is
"Tomb" being quoted.
But then, who is the "he" in the last paragraph who says that ZKS is
hoping to collaborate with FBI engineers? Is this still Tomb, the
FBI spokesman, or Smith of ZKS? Presumably only Smith can speak of
ZKS's hopes.
In any case, the fact that the FBI claims not to be blocking implies
that the blockage will be cleared up shortly. The FBI site is not hard
to access. telnet www.fbi.com 80, followed by GET / HTTP/1.0 leads to a
page full of data. This is not something which will be easily disrupted
by firewalls. Clearly the excuse about technical problems is just that.
As predicted earlier, the publication of this article will make the
problem go away. It may also embarrass the FBI somewhat when they are
forced to remove the blockage.
