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February 23, 2007

Hosted on Google's free Blogger.com site, a Web log (blog) that was shut down by the search giant after its author posted a death threat against a New Zealand politician can still be reached using Google's own search engine.

The blog in question, CyfSwatch, was closed down yesterday after weeks of complaints by New Zealand authorities and a few politicians.

It was operated by critics of the country's government-run CYF (Child Youth and Family) service which is responsible for removing children from homes for care and protection.

The blog encouraged various readers to post messages containing personal information about individual social workers.

However, an Internet search using the name of the deleted blog reveals archived "caches" of the site that have been preserved by Google. What's more, all the damaging posts can be easily accessed from the cache.

Google describes its cache as "the snapshot that we took of the page as we crawled the Web on that specific day". It is commonly used to uncover deleted websites and pages.

Additionally, and to make matters even worse, the offending bloggers have started-up a new version of their blog on a non-Google platform.

Last month, the Ministry of Social Development, which runs the agency, called in police amid fears the Web site was putting some of its staff at risk and an official complaint was logged at Google.

Following the complaint, Google censored postings on the site but still allowed the blog to operate, which was created on Google's free blogging platform.

But that situation drastically changed yesterday after the site posted blogs threatening the life of a specific politician.

With New Zealand's so-called anti-smacking bill, which would make it an offence for parents to strike their own children, going before parliament yesterday, postings to the site were critical of Green MP Sue Bradford who introduced that bill.

One posting said Bradford was a "worthy candidate for NZ's first political assassination" and another post called on her home address to be published on the site.

Yesterday, Google spokeswoman Victoria Grand said the blog was taken down after a complaint from the Ministry of Social Development. She said it wasn't just yesterday's death threat that prompted the site shutdown, but that Google believed it was a repeat violation of its Blogger.com site rules.

"In our ToS (Terms of Service) we reserve the right to shut down blogs that have repeat violations, and here we had a repeat violation issue," Grand said. "We really try to remove as little content as possible. We don't want to be a mediator of content and we believe blogs are a platform for free expression and we do everything we can to work with bloggers to keep the content up," she said.

She also added that Google would be happy to have the authors of the site post a new blog, as long as it did not again break the site's terms of service. Bradford yesterday said she was glad Google had removed the blog.

"I think it would be fantastic if Google have taken it down earlier," she said. Bradford added that social workers who feared for their lives had contacted her several times after the blog named them.

Bob McCoskrie from the conservative Family First pressure group said he was uncomfortable the blog had named individual workers, but stopped short of saying the blog should be censored, if at all.

"I think there is a major problem if Google is going to start making moral judgments about what should or shouldn't be on Web sites or blogs. There is plenty of more objectionable stuff, like child pornography they should go after," he said.

McCoskrie said he was aware of another site that had been created that duplicated much of the information in the censored weblog. The information on that site appeared to have removed the Bradford death threat.

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Source: SMH.com.au