At 10:04:53 EST on Friday, someone using a U.S. State Department server visited this site with the anachronistic Google search, “Eli Pariser communist.” As with most of the government-hosted searches that land here, I imagine this one was a personal interest search that had nothing to do with any actual government task — like the search yesterday using a Social Security Administration server to find a satirical passage about the election of Gene Robinson as Episcopal bishop in New Hampshire. But it makes you wonder, doesn’t it?
It would seem that the government wouldn’t use traceable servers and IP addresses to conduct anything like intelligence gathering. (Or would they?) It would also seem that communism wouldn’t represent much of a threat to American interests anymore. I suppose I wouldn’t blink if someone from, say, the Department of Agriculture wondered if the MoveOn.org organizer was a pinko, but I can’t help but raise an eyebrow when someone at the State Department finds this a question worth wasting ten minutes on.
The server name was “acheson-a3.state.gov”; the IP address was 169.253.4.9. I’d love to know more about this particular visit.