BY Nancy Scola | Wednesday, February 23 2011

With your trusty writer crashing on a piece, let's try something a little different for techPresident: an experiment in crowd fact checking. The subject? A technical explanation that's being repeated widely in political press coverage this week but might possibly be a dubious one.

The deal is thus: DefendWisconsin.org, you might recall, is a pro-union website that was for some period of time blocked on the guest wireless Internet network of the Wisconsin State Capitol, where protestors have been gathering to object to Republican Governor Scott Walker's proposal to challenge the power some public unions have to organize and operate.

Governor Walker's office admitted that, indeed, that the Defend Wisconsin site had been inaccessible from inside the statehouse. But the block wasn't any sort of targeted strike against a political foe, they contended. It was a technical situation: the site simply got caught up on in the way that the capitol building's in-house network was configured, for safety's sake. Here's the relevant claim:

"The Department of Administration blocks all new websites shortly after they are created, until they go through a software approval program that unblocks them," [Governor Walker's spokesperson Cullen] Werwie said. "Within 30 minutes of being notified this website was blocked, DOA circumvented the software and immediately made the website accessible."

A labor-friendly contact points out that, from a non-network security person's perspective, Werwie's claim seems a little curious.

Is it really possible that Internet connection would blacklist every "new website" before allowing its users to get to the site? If so, how, exactly, would it work for every single new site that joins the Internet to go through a whitelisting process whereby a "software approval program...unblocks them"? Site's aren't (always) stamped with a date of creation, so it seems like you'd here be checking sites against domain name creation records, which seems a considerable undertaking -- especially when we're talking about the guest network in the Wisconsin State Capitol and not the in-house network of, well, the Central Intelligence Agency or the U.S. Embassy Islamabad.

Or maybe this is normal network security practice? That's where you smart folks come in. Network security people, save me from doing real reporting (for the moment, at least) and let me know, what do you make of Werwie's explanation. Plausible? Or a dodge? Share your take, and please show your work. Leave a note in the comments, or hit me by email or Twitter -- @nancyscola or @techpresident. Feel free to use the hashtag #WIwifi.