Council censorship

Dear Sir or Madam,

It has been shown that Westminster City Council has blocked access
from it's network to the website known by the URL of
www.notobikeparkingfees.com (hosted on IP number 85.234.147.197 ).

1)Please provide name/s of the people who made that decision?

2)The reasons for implementing the block?

3)Who at Westminster City Council still has access to this website
(names of departments accepted)?

Yours faithfully,

Maria Hardwick
IPC Media

Dear Gordon Deas ,

Thank you for your last reply.

I have contacted the systems administrators for the website found
at www.notobikeparkingfees.com questioning the redirection of
Westsminster City Council network users.

For question 2 of your reply, you state that Council Staff were
redirected to pornographic content, which I presume was hosted on a
different IP number than the www.notobikeparkingfees.com website. A
spokesperson for the noTo campaign has refuted this suggestion and
went on to say the only redirect was to the Google.com search page
by use of a common ReWrite rule, which has now been commented out.

Given there is a discrepancy, do you have any further proof of your
claim that the NoTo site did redirect to pornographic website and
such a redirect used a method which was indisputably under their
control?

I am concerned that you may have been mistaken, as the source of my
original enquiry came from an actual user of the Westminster City
Council network, who never experienced a redirect to pornographic
material when visiting www.notobikeparkingfees.com.

Yours sincerely,

Maria Hardwick IPC Media

Dear Gordon Deas,

Thank you for your reply.

So it seems that your original answer to question 2 which said
“Visitors to this Website from Westminster's corporate network were
redirected to pornographic content.” was not in fact true, as both
you and the No To Bike Parking Tax admins now agree that the
redirect did only go to the google.com search page.

It is unreasonable to suggest that the No To Bike Parking Tax
admins can be held responsible for the searches Westminster City
Council staff make on Google.

You are also not able to prove your claim that the rewrite rule
contained key words, that if conducting a search using google would
produce links from google to pornographic content.

A more truthful answer would have been to simply say you were
redirected to the google search engine, and not imply that council
employees were redirected directly to pornographic content.

I have been sent a copy of the rewrite rule which was:

#Redirect IP
#RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^195\.110\.75\.89$
#RewriteRule .*
http://www.google.com/webhp?q=no+to+bike... [R,L]

As you have failed to provide any screen shots or point to and
cached pages, I consider the matter closed.

Yours faithfully,

Maria Hardwick IPC Media