Bush website censored!

The censorship thing continues to annoy me. Sure I can access my page now, but there are still a lot of other sites that I can't access. Some news site this morning linked to the Bush campaign site. I clicked it and got the error message, "The page cannot be displayed." Hmmm.....is this anything like being unable to access the Republican website? The people there, by the way, haven't responded beyond the initial "We got your email and understand your concern." Next I tried typing the site into Unipeak.com, and got through immediately. So I sent this letter to the folks at the Bush site:

Subject: Korea censors your site
To: BushCheney04@GeorgeWBush.com

I'm an American living in South Korea as an English teacher. I want to draw your attention to the fact that your site is inaccessible from South Korea. Yes, the Korea that is supposedly an ally of the USA.

On the night of June 24, 2004, the Korean government went deeper into the world of Internet censorship by banning a whole slew of sites, mostly those related to the Kim Sun Il beheading. However, many innocent sites got caught up in the hysteria. Any idea why yours would be among them? There are many undecided voters, and Americans overseas often use the Internet to research issues. How are we supposed to make an informed decision if we can't access the information??

I know enough to be able to circumvent the block, but others (especially in the older generation) probably give up after typing in the web address and getting the "The page cannot be displayed" error message. This is particularly troublesome because the Korean government refuses to release a list of all of the blocked sites.

This is something you may want to look into, especially since the John Kerry website is not blocked.

I think it's so weird that they use their own domain and are censored, and Kerry's site is not. Is someone in the Korean government trying to influence the election?! I hinted at that in the letter, but didn't want to sound like a conspiracy-theory nut.

There is censorship everywhere!! One of the proxies I tried using gave me this error message:

ACCESS HAS BEEN DENIED

Access to the page:

{{{a normal, everyday, nothing-wrong-with-it page}}}

has been denied for the following reason:

Weighted phrase limit exceeded. You are seeing this error because the page you attempted to access contains, or is labelled as containing, material that has been deemed inappropriate. If you have any queries contact your ICT Co-ordinator or Network Manager.

Then just for the heck of it, I tried the Big Hominid and that went through no problem. ????? I would think he would have more "inappropriate" content than the first site I tried to access! The weaknesses of machines. Then I tried the Bush website and was going to laugh so hard if it was denied, but it went through fine.

I sent the following letter to the MIC and ICEC, and a slightly different version to the head honcho at the MIC, as he received Master's and Ph.D. degrees from American universities, thus knows plenty of English (one would assume). The webmasters may or may not know much English. This time I felt OK with closing with "sincerely":

Subject: Censorship--when will it end?
To: webmaster@mic.go.kr, webmaster@icec.or.kr

This letter is regarding the Internet censorship which began on June 24, 2004 and continues today, 5 weeks later. While Blogspot pages are now accessible from many computers, pages hosted at blogs.com, typepad.com, livejournal.com, mu.nu, and others remain blocked. Please give me some idea of when I can expect to be able to access these sites, most of which have nothing to do with Korea.

*****Where can I find a complete list of censored sites/domains?***** As it stands now, I don't know if a site is having technical difficulties, is no longer in existence, or is among those offensive to the Korean government.