The Gub'Mint, Readin' My Blawg

[phoenixx]

So it both amused me and made me a bit paranoid that I have attracted several new dot gov readers on my blog over the last few weeks. The most regular reader comes from a dhs.gov host on a sneaky IP. While these "visitors" all stick around and read a variety of posts, the search string that brings them in amuses the crap out of me "Irish Tattoo Meanings", followed by a link to the blog post where I talked about my new wrist tattoo. Does that mean the Irish are on the watch list? LOL These visitors then immediately go to my political posts and blog rants sections and start reading, spending quite a bit of time on each page, according to the stat tracker. What do y'all think, should I be intrigued? honored? afraid? cautious? in the process of banning the IP? what?

[magenta321]

I'm not sure how you should deal with it, but your title made me laugh out loud.

[theworm[$]]

Who are you and why are you here at EA. We're a nice friendly patriotic site you know. We don't need any crazy tattooed terrorist types.

[mjfrombuffalo[$]]

God Bless America!

[phoenixx]

[mjfrombuffalo[$]]

OK so seriously - if you IP block, they'll probably still check out your blog, but with different addresses and so you won't necessarily know it, so I'd leave the .gov IP's alone to see what they're doing.

Working with state government, I've found a lot of the people who use computers that are somehow connected to "dfa dot state dot ny dot us" are just people, some of whom are very dedicated and professional and others who play a lot of Freecell and send out mass emailings that end with "If you do not forward this in the next three minutes, the fleas of a thousand camels will infest your armpits." Some of them have Internet access. Your .gov folks could be just plain old civil servants surfing on the government's time (and the taxpayer's dime).