Connecticut Schools Censors The Vatican, NRA, Republican, And Christian Websites As ‘Hate Speech’

A Connecticut school is being accused of internet censoring the websites for the Vatican, the NRA, Republicans, and others Christian sites. When approached about the problem, school board officials are claiming the websites need to be blocked in order to prevent “hate speech” from reaching students in the schools.

In a related report by The Inquisitr, the internet as a whole recently celebrated a milestone birthday, but since porn consumes much of its traffic, some people believe some form of internet censorship is necessary.

Andrew Lampart is a senior at Nonnewaug High School in Woodbury who was attempting to do internet searches at school for his research on gun control laws, but then he discovered that the NRA website was blocked while pro-gun control websites were accessible. Then he realized the Connecticut Republican Party’s website was blocked while the Democratic Party’s site was open. The internet censorship even applied to pro-life groups like the National Right To Life, while pro-choice groups like Planned Parenthood could be searched. More alarming was the fact that Christian websites like the Vatican website were censored while Islamic websites were once again open.

When local superintendent Jody Goeler claimed that so-called hate speech was the issue, Bill Donohue, head the Catholic League, protested this designation:

“It is alleged that you support censoring students at Nonnewaug High School from accessing the Vatican’s website on the grounds that it promotes ‘hate speech.’ Would you please identify examples of ‘hate speech’ found on the Vatican’s website?”

At first, Goeler responded by saying “the district is trying to determine the reason for the inconsistency and if bias is pervasive enough to justify switching to another content filtering provider.” Then, according to The Daily Caller, the blame was shifted to the Dell SonicWALL hardware firewall system the school uses for filtering internet traffic, but does this allegation make any sense?

Before entering the world of journalism, I spent years in the IT industry working as a sub-contractor for defense companies, NASA, and others. While I have not had a chance to configure a SonicWALL product in several years, I highly doubt Dell would configure their newer hardware firewalls to be politically or religiously biased by default. If you go to the Dell website, this is how they say their web content filtering service functions:

“Administrators can enforce multiple custom policies for individual users, groups or specific category types. Local URL filtering controls can allow or deny specific domains or hosts. To block objectionable material more effectively, administrators can also create or customize filtering databases.”

In other words, someone configured this Connecticut school’s SonicWALL to be biased in its internet censorship. SonicWALL also logs administrator activity in addition to users although I’m not certain if it’s possible or not to determine who configured these particular settings.