Tech Shout!

Google has reportedly shut down a blog which goes by the name of CYFSwatch soon after the blog posted a death threat against a New Zealand politician. In fact, authorities in New Zealand complained to Google for weeks on end, about the controversial website. However, the Cyfswatch bloggers acted defiant and actually went ahead and published the site’s content elsewhere.

The government-run Child Youth and Family (CYF) service is part of the Ministry of Social Developmet, and has been responsible for taking into their care, children from torn home only for their care and protection. Now, the CYFSwatch blog has been critical of New Zealand’s CYF service and had called on people who were angry at CYF, to post messages containing personal information about individual social workers.

The anonymous threat that was posted on the CYFSwatch blog spoke about smashing Green Party MP Sue Bradford in the face, and also described her as a target for political assassination. According to Bradford, “I have taken them seriously, but I’m not going to be intimidated by them.”

The CYFSwatch blog went on further to say that Sue Bradford would be a worthy candidate for New Zealand’s first political assassination. Yet another post called on her home address to be published on the website.

So what has Google done regarding this issue? A web search using the name of the deleted blog shows archived “caches” of the CYFSwatch blog that have been preserved by Google. What’s more, all the threatening posts can easily be accessed as well. Now, Google has described its cache as “the snapshot that we took of the page as we crawled the web”. It is commonly used to uncover deleted websites and pages.

And the offending Anti-CYF bloggers have also started up a new version of their blog on a non-Google platform. The CYFSwatch blog was initially created on Google’s blogging platform.

In the first half of January 2007, the Ministry of Social Development, which runs the CYF agency, brought the police in, fearing that the anti-CYF site was putting some of its staff at risk. What followed was a complaint to Google, after which the search engine giant began to censor postings on the website, but continued to allow the blog to continue operating.

“I’m thrilled that Google’s finally taken this website down not so much on my own behalf but on behalf of all those CYFS social workers who have been intimidated and threatened,” says Bradford who has referred the matter to the police. “This is a huge problem all around the world about being able to police the web,” she added.

Police want to talk to whoever made the threat but say it does not appear to constitute a criminal offence.
Google spokeswoman Victoria Grand says it was not just the threats that prompted the site shutdown but a repeated violation of site rules.

However, the move has upset some of the blog’s contributors. “All of a sudden the last opportunity that people in this country had for free speech against an organisation that has caused so much pain and suffering has gone,” says Cysfwatch contributor Craig Martin.

And the blog organisers are claiming Google’s actions are a breathtaking display of socialist censorship. They say they have made copies of the blog and are still publishing it elsewhere.