Considering how unpopular Bush is with people around the world, I kind of assumed BC04 would want to allow easy access to glowingly positive spin crafted by the campaign itself. Apparently, I assumed wrong.
Surfers outside the US have been unable to visit the official re-election site of President George W Bush.
The blocking of browsers sited outside the US began in the early hours of Monday morning.
Since then people outside the US trying to browse the site get a message saying they are not authorised to view it.
The blocking does not appear to be due to an attack by vandals or malicious hackers, but as a result of a policy decision by the Bush camp.
I haven’t seen independent confirmation of this, and since I’m in the U.S., I can’t figure out a way to check for myself. The BBC, however, reported that Netcraft, which monitors web traffic, checked Bush’s official campaign website through stations in London, Amsterdam and Sydney, all of which failed. When Netcraft used four monitoring stations in the United States, there were no problems.
It seems like an odd step for the Bush campaign to take. Aren’t there voting Americans living abroad that might want to access the site before making their choice? And what’s on the site that the campaign doesn’t want international visitors to see?
I realize that limiting international access might save BC04 a few bucks in bandwidth, but a) I seriously doubt foreign visitors were driving their traffic in any meaningful way, and b) the campaign is still flush with cash and with less than six days until the election, this seems rather unnecessary.
Then again, Bush seems to think there are multiple “Internets,” so many he assumes international visitors will get to his campaign site some other way.