Thanks to a comment from Eric of Wo Bu Mingbai, I’ve learned that the US propaganda people are playing their own games with Internet site blocking.

The U.S. government concocted a brilliant plan a few years ago: Why not give Internet surfers in China and Iran the ability to bypass their nations’ notoriously restrictive blocks on Web sites?
Soon afterward, the U.S. International Broadcasting Bureau (IBB) invented a way to let people in China and Iran easily route around censorship by using a U.S.-based service to view banned sites such as BBC News, MIT and Amnesty International.

But an independent report released Monday reveals that the U.S. government also censors what Chinese and Iranian citizens can see online. Technology used by the IBB, which puts out the Voice of America broadcasts, prevents them from visiting Web addresses that include a peculiar list of verboten keywords. The list includes “ass” (which inadvertently bans usembassy.state.gov), “breast” (breastcancer.com), “hot” (hotmail.com and hotels.com), “pic” (epic.noaa.gov) and “teen” (teens.drugabuse.gov).

“The minute you try to temper assistance with evading censorship with judgments about how that power should be used by citizens, you start down a path from which there’s no clear endpoint,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard University law professor and co-author of the report prepared by the OpenNet Initiative.

How stupid can we get?

In the abstract, the argument is a reasonable one. If the IBB’s service had blocked only hard-core pornographic Web sites, few people would object.

Instead, the list unintentionally reveals its author’s views of what’s appropriate and inappropriate. The official naughty-keyword list displays a conservative bias that labels any Web address with “gay” in them as verboten–a decision that affects thousands of Web sites that deal with gay and lesbian issues, as well as DioceseOfGaylord.org, a Roman Catholic site.

More to the point, the U.S. government could have set a positive example to the world regarding acceptance of gays and lesbians–especially in Iran, which punishes homosexuality with death.