Web fitering and Internet monitoring

Dear Subscribers.  I thought I would remind readers that the patron site http://monkeyfist.com/ has been classified by the US webfiltering firm, Websense Inc. as a "Racism/Hate"site.  This internet monitoring company has many large and small corporate, educational and government clients in the US and Canada.  You can look this up for yourself and see their categorisation schema : http://www.websense.com/support/url_lookup.cfm 

While I am all in favour of providing firewalls to keep out viruses and instituting corporate polices to discourage employees from wasting their work time surfing the Net, I feel there is a profound political sub-text in the categorisation of your site as "Racism/Hate".  I guess it is now considered a form of Hate to be opposed to the ruling class or the machinations of the state!

I would be interested in how much discussion and exposure there has been of corporate internet monitoring of employee use and what they can see, and why.  I would also be interested in the technical and ideological decisions that go into the categorisation and blocking of these sites.  Perhaps Websense should change their name to Webcensor!  It's also interesting to browse the names of the institutional subscribers to this service and to wonder how much this violates 1st Amendment rights/Charter rights  (many of the schools are right-wing fundamentalist Christian colleges).  Perhaps a well placed FOI request to certain governments listed would stir things up.

I know in my Canadian provincial jurisdiction we had to fight to allow employee access at work to their bargaining units'  union websites.  I found that many of the sites that are blocked are innocuous, but because they have some sexual content, they are considered potential employee time-wasters (.... as distinct from all the other uncensored distracting sites?)  I find it odd we can still access the pages of Salon.com that have provocative sexual commentary, as long as they do not have the path </sex/> as part of their URL !!

 There was also an issue of  the necessity that psychiatric and correctional staff working with violent sensual offenders or the criminally insane should have access to ALL sites dealing with sex or pornography to gain insight into their supposed treatment regimes.  The psychiatric hospitals function in our jurisdiction has now been privatised to a non-profit corporation outside the public service.  The issue of civil service administrative directives related to information technology use applying to them is now a moot point.

I think the worst part of these internet monitoring services is the ability they give the employer to engage in electronic surveillance or harassment of employees based on their political and social interests.

Any commentary on this creeping cybernetic phenomenon would be beneficial

Civicus,
Canada