Does Smith Fear the Impact of Smith Watch?

A while back, I noticed that whenever I clicked on the link from my website to Adrian Smith’s Congressional website, I’d get the following message:

Not Found
The requested URL was not found on this server.

I’m sure others have noticed this as well if they’ve tried.

So, I started getting in contact with the Blogger.com technical support to determine what the problem was.

We went through several different things that are usually tried to see if there is just some error happening: Deleted and reentered, tried taking the slash off at the end, added the link with AND without the “www” at the beginning, even tried to do a hand coding of the link rather than using the pre-set “widget” that stored a list of links. Nothing worked. The same error occurred.

Finally I asked the team: Could there be something on Smith's end actually blocking my site, maybe even on purpose? Is that even possible?


I got my response today. Some of it is technical, and I don’t understand it, but what the tech wrote is very clear in explaining what they found (emphasis is mine):

The problem isn't with your link. It's with THEIR server. It's rejecting (giving a 404) when the link comes from blogspot. What a douche this guy is. He's blocking requests when it comes from bloggers.

Ok, to explain. Whenever you click on a link, the browser sends off a request to the server...yadda yadda...included in that is the referrer of the page you came from. His Official Government Website, that WE pay for (well I'm guessing on that part), is throwing up a 404 when the referrer heading comes from blogspot.com. I tested from one of my test blogs and it doesn't work either, also uploaded a test page to googlepages (a different domain) and it works. So it really is blogspot they are blocking via the referrer.

Here's the rejected conversation from blogspot

http://www.adriansmith.house.gov/
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.adriansmith.house.gov
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv: 1.8.1.9) Gecko/20071025 Firefox/2.0.0.9
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/ html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Referrer: http://nethirddistrict.blogspot.com/2007/11/smith-misleads-constituen...

HTTP/1.x 404 Not Found
Date: Sat, 03 Nov 2007 15:00:21 GMT
Server: NOYB
Last-Modified: Thu, 29 Dec 2005 15:21:28 GMT
Etag: "57ca10-39a-4543ae00"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 922
Keep-Alive: timeout=2, max=1000
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
----------------------------------------------------------
Referrer from blogspot == page not found

Now, same thing with referrers turned off:

http://www.adriansmith.house.gov/
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.adriansmith.house.gov
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv: 1.8.1.9) Gecko/20071025 Firefox/2.0.0.9
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/
html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive

HTTP/1.x 200 OK
Date: Sat, 03 Nov 2007 15:04:48 GMT
Server: NOYB
Expires: Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT
Last-Modified: Sat, 03 Nov 2007 15:04:49 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-
check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Content-Encoding: gzip
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Length: 6577
Keep-Alive: timeout=2, max=1000
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

The ONLY difference between the two is the referrer. And the congressman's server is basically rejecting anything with a blogspot referrer. I'm tempted to say that maybe, just maybe this is some sort of technical error, but really there is no reason for that. It HAS to be done deliberately.

Looks like you can get a new blog post out of this. Congressman Adrian Smith is afraid of Bloggers!

So to sum up, everything on your end is correct. It's the dear congressman that is playing games. Notice how his taxpayer server is also configured to Identify itself as NOYB (none of your business). Nice guy. Nebraska huh? Without looking I'm going to guess he's a Republican.

And here's the link I made on a test blog
http://br-testing.blogspot.com/

It's being blocked as well. So it's anything from blogspot. Looking around, I don't see many others but you linking to him from blogspot, so it must've been you that scared him. Great Work!!!

That's just such a pathetic thing for them to do. I shouldn't be surprised I suppose, but good god.

So, it appears that any link from Blogspot is PURPOSELY BLOCKED FROM GAINING ACCESS.

That’s right, the website we pay for as taxpayers cannot be accessed in this manner. You can access the link on the New Nebraska Network site, but not through mine.

And it’s only Smith’s website that does it. If you look at the “Relevant Links” on the side of this webpage, you’ll see I’ve now added Nebraska's other 2 Congressmen, Jeff Fortenberry and Lee Terry. When you click on their links, they go straight to their Congressional websites.

The question, then, is WHY would Adrian Smith and his staff do such a thing? Just what about a link to his Congressional website from mine is a concern to them? Could they actually be nervous about the things I expose about Smith on a regular basis?

When you combine this action, and the fact that they refused to provide copies of what are publically available reports (Financial Disclosed, Franked Mail, Gift and Travel) after months of attempts, this can only lead to one conclusion:

Adrian Smith fears dissent. He fears truth. He fears anything that shows the REAL Adrian, rather than the false image he continues to try and portray. In other words - HE FEARS ME!

The fact is that I, like anyone else, am a private, voting citizen of the 3rd District of Nebraska. And just like all other citizens of this District, my tax dollars pay his salary, and they pay for his website. Just like all citizens, I have a right to my opinions, and I have a right to voice those opinions, whether he agrees with them or not. I have a right to question him, I have a right to hold him accountable, and I have a right to demand that he represent EVERYONE: Not just those that voted for him, not just those that are in one party, not just those that paid for his campaign, and not just those that will never disagree with him.

These actions show a man that is NOT a Representative of the people he was elected to work for, and someone who fails to live up to the oath of office that he took. That oath states:

I solemnly swear or affirm that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter, so help me God.

Adrian Smith is not bearing true faith and allegiance to the Constitution by trying to limit dissent, or this case, do the childish act of blocking access from a specific site. He’s also not faithfully discharging the duties of his office, which is to serve ALL of his constituents.

Not only are his actions unjustified, they are downright pathetic, and he doesn’t deserve the title of Congressman.