Adrian Smith fears blogs (UPDATED!)


Adrian Smith, who apparently knows the Beatrice Fiddler uses typepad.

Third district congressman Adrian Smith just keeps making life more interesting.

A few days ago, I wrote about his lies on SCHIP – now, his official congressional website is blocking incoming links from blogger accounts!

The same Lisa Hannah of Smith Watch who did the hard work on the aforementioned entry posted this over at New Nebraska Network — her step-by-step attempt to solve the mystery of why Adrian Smith’s official congressional website wouldn’t load from the link on her blog.

Of particular note is the response from the Blogger.com technician. Again, these are the Blogger.com technician’s words, not Lisa’s:

The problem isn’t with your link. It’s with THEIR server. It’s rejecting (giving a 404) when the link comes from blogspot. What a douche this guy is. He’s blocking requests when it comes from bloggers.

His Official Government Website, that WE pay for (well I’m guessing on that part), is throwing up a 404 when the referrer heading comes from blogspot.com. I tested from one of my test blogs and it doesn’t work either, also uploaded a test page to googlepages (a different domain) and it works. So it really is blogspot they are blocking via the referrer.

Looks like you can get a new blog post out of this. Congressman Adrian Smith is afraid of Bloggers!

So to sum up, everything on your end is correct. It’s the dear congressman that is playing games. Notice how his taxpayer server is also configured to Identify itself as NOYB (none of your business). Nice guy. Nebraska huh? Without looking I’m going to guess he’s a Republican.

Looking around, I don’t see many others but you linking to him from blogspot, so it must’ve been you that scared him. Great Work!!!

That’s just such a pathetic thing for them to do. I shouldn’t be surprised I suppose, but good god.

UPDATE!!! (11/05) You may notice in the comments that there is a post from GovTrends, who take responsibility as the “website vendor” for Smith.

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 ‚Äòblocking‚Äô of Blogspot is affecting all of the websites on our server…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.

I was a little suspicious that such a large vendor with a client list such as theirs would be completely clueless about this, and fortunately for all of us, Lisa Hannah again does the legwork. She contacted GovTrends, who failed to give her any kind of satisfactory answer, so she put their words to the test:

He said, as you can see, their servers are set by default. He kept on wanting to tell me about some site on the internet that tells about the biggest spammers, and that blogspot.com was one of them…

So, we have Smith’s office continuing to refuse to comment on this, and a provider wanting us to take them at face value.

So let’s look at some of the clients that they serve, as noted on their site:

– JP Morgan
– NYC Health
– Sirius Satellite
– Snapple
– Godiva Chocolatier
– WebMD
– Wharton: University of Pennsylvania
– The Bahamas

So far, their own site and the ones I’ve tested that I can see they run have all been accessible through Blogspot.com.

GovTrends pleads ignorance regarding the blogger blocking, saying it was just automatic for all their clients due to apparent “spamming” from blogger.com (still not actually sure how incoming links from a blog can be spam, but anyway). Yet this threat posed by blogger.com is apparently so severe that none of their large clients – nor GovTrends themselves – have incoming blogger links blocked.

8 Responses

  1. 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

  2. They’ve been busy little beavers!!

    Here’s the kicker. I called them, and they refused to give a list of the other members of congress they serve. They claimed it’s automatic due to spam.

    I tested all the corporations website and their own, linking from blogspot.com. THEY ALL WENT THROUGH JUST FINE.

    So, that leads to the question: Is this automatic blocking only occuring on servers for members of Congress? Is that even believable? And just how many members of Congress do they actually work for since they’re not providing a list?

  3. Haha, so they claim that they automatically block blogger accounts because apparently the spam is so bad, yet they don’t even block it on their own site? Nice try, GovTrends!

  4. 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 ‚Äúspider‚Äù 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 ‚Äúblacklist config‚Äù 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

  5. This is just another case of somebody not checking their facts and running with something just to create a story to smear someone.

    GET A JOB!

  6. Hi Paul,
    If you clicked on any of the links I’ve provided, you’ll see no shortage of people who phoned directly to both Adrian Smith’s office and GovTrends attempting to get the facts and were unable to get any information out of either.
    GovTrends only communicates by way of these one-way comment posts, and Adrian Smith’s office simply doesn’t respond. As Hannah added at NNN,

    This actually proved a good example of what WILL happen every time Adrian Smith and his staff continue with the policy of refusing to communicate.

    For the last 10 months, Smith and his staff have made it clear through their actions that they will NOT answer questions, or provide anything else to those that question Smith’s actions. They refuse to a return phone calls (with the exception of once since they learned what I was doing), they refuse to answer letters and emails, they refuse to provide publicly available reports that they have to send out for those who don’t live in the DC area. They block access to Smith unless it’s on their terms, they create scenarios where he’s only presented in a certain light.

    In other words, what you see and what you perceive is severely controlled.

    In trying to figure out at the website issue, nothing came from Smith’s office. Not a word. Given their history of negative actions, one was only left with speculation. Every time I’ve tried to get their side of a story, and tried to be fair….Nothing.

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