Bush campaign Web site blocks overseas access

IDG News Service - Net surfers outside the U.S. interested in President George W. Bush's re-election strategy aren't currently able to learn about it from his campaign Web site. Visitors from a number of international locations reported hitting "access denied" errors as they tried to reach the site on Tuesday.

Web surfers in London; Paris; Oslo; Linz, Austria; and Taipei, Taiwan, encountered a "403 Forbidden" access-denied error page when they tried to contact Bush's Web site, GeorgeWBush.com. Surfers in the U.S. reported no problems.

GeorgeWBush.com is the official Web site of Bush-Cheney '04 Inc., Bush's Arlington, Va.-based re-election organization. The site features campaign material such as advertisements along with Bush's position statements and policy plans. The site also includes a link to an outside site processing campaign donations; surfers both outside and inside the U.S. said they were able to reach the donation Web site.

A Bush-Cheney campaign spokeswoman referred questions to Michael Turk, the organization's Internet campaign director. Turk didn't return several calls seeking comment.

U.K.-based analysis firm Netcraft Ltd. said the Bush site appears to be using network management technology from Cambridge, Mass.-based Akamai Technologies Inc. to restrict access. Netcraft monitors Web site response times from several locations, four in the U.S. and three outside. Since Monday morning, requests to GeorgeWBush.com have failed from Netcraft's London, Amsterdam and Sydney stations, the company said.

GeorgeWBush.com began using Akamai to manage site traffic on Oct. 21, following a six-hour site outage early last week, according to Netcraft. An Akamai spokeswoman declined to comment on the operations of GeorgeWBush.com and referred questions to the site's hosting company, Chattanooga, Tenn.-based SmarTech Corp.

SmarTech President Jeff Averbeck said he was unaware of the international blocking, adding that it wasn't originating from SmarTech. "All we do is host the site. I have no control over what's being done outside our servers," he said.

Web performance monitoring firm Keynote Systems Inc. also confirmed access restrictions on the Web site. Senior Internet analyst Roopak Patel attempted to reach GeorgeWBush.com using several of Keynote's computers around the world. He found that the Web site is available from the U.S. and Canada, but not from many other locations, including Oslo, Brussels, London, Amsterdam and Lisbon in Europe; Tokyo, Taipei, and Sydney in the Asia-Pacific region; and Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro.

Patel said the 403 message is a fairly specific error description. "It is more definitive than the 404 type of error where you can't tell what is going on at the server side," he said. "The server understands the request,