October 26, 2004

Blocking the World on Cue

by Nick Montfort · , 7:41 pm

I recently blogged about a presidential campaign site located in Uruguay, encouraging people, such as my fellow US citizens, to check out the political expression going on there, and to learn some about another country’s politics by doing this. Unfortunately, people in Uruguay and other countries are now not allowed to view the campaign Web site of the president of the United States. Netcraft offers some charts and additional details. (If you live in the US you can reach Bush’s site, or you can check to see that you can’t if you live elsewhere.) Of course, US citizens who live overseas and are voting by mail, and those who are currently overseas and will be returning to vote in person in the November 2 election, use the same networks and are also being denied access to this president’s site. John Kerry’s site is still accessible overseas.

Update, Oct 27: longer story from Wednesday, story picked up by The Register, still no comment from the campaign. Oct 28: Hanna, Jill, and Gonzalo at WCG noted the story here and blogged about it, with Gonzalo offering a mirror of Bush’s campaign game; there is now a top cluster of tech news on Google News containing about 94 stories on this blocking from different sources: The Washington Post, Slashdot, ABC News, The BBC, etc.

4 Responses to “Blocking the World on Cue”


  1. join-the-dots Says:
    October 27th, 2004 at 12:30 pm bush bans overseas visitors
    Since Monday, George Bush’s official presidential re-election site has been blocking all requests from outside the US. More on BBC News…

    Update: Nick has some more links to stories about this over at GTxA. He, quite rightly, points out that:

    …

  2. mark Says:
    October 29th, 2004 at 5:01 am

    According to some Canadians I know, the site is still accessible there. Perhaps Bush is not aware that they aren’t part of the United States…

  3. Randy Adams Says:
    November 1st, 2004 at 2:47 pm

    Hi folks,

    I live in Canada, on Vancouver Island, and the Bush site is still accessible here. It loads very slowly. [ The southern portion of the island is below the 49th parallel, so maybe this makes a difference ;-]

    Cheers,

    Randy.

  4. nick Says:
    November 1st, 2004 at 4:34 pm

    From looking at the stories, it seems that our Canadian allies have always been granted access to Bush’s website. But he forgot Poland.

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