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March 19, 2009 12:50 PM

Morgan Stanley's Censors Block Access to Top Financial Site

By
David Weir
(MoneyWatch)  "The truth shall set you free," the Bible informs us, but somebody better inform the censors over at Morgan Stanley, who are allegedly blocking some of the best content available online for dissecting the financial crisis-- The Baseline Scenario --from appearing on its corporate site.
Any website owner has the right to block any content, of course, so here are Morgan's official guidelines for the 23 types of content to be blocked:
  1. Abused Drugs
  2. Adult Material
  3. Freeware and Software Download
  4. Gambling
  5. Hacking
  6. Illegal or Questionable
  7. Instant Messaging Internet Communication
  8. Keyloggers
  9. Malicious Web Sites
  10. Military & Extremist
  11. Peer-to-Peer File Sharing
  12. Personal Network Storage and Backup
  13. Personals and Dating
  14. Phishing & Other Frauds
  15. Proxy Avoidance
  16. Racism & Hate
  17. Social Networking and Personal Sites
  18. Spyware
  19. Tasteless
  20. URL Translation Sites
  21. Violence
  22. Web Chat
  23. Web-based Email
Now, in the comments thread following Baseline's post, at least one Morgan employee suggested that IT issues just might be to blame as opposed to human intervention. God knows, we all can identify with that type of problem. But, to date, it appears that Morgan Stanley has not officially confirmed or denied what is going on, so I thought the authors of the excellent Financial Crisis for Beginners deserved a bit of moral support in the form of this post.
Thanks once again to Erik Sherman, my Bnet colleague and most excellent tip-sender from the Eastern timezone!

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