Video: State Bill Colorado
Senate Minority Leader Josh Penry tells a legislative committee that his staff has issues accessing Web sites because of the Capitol’s too-tight Web filters. Michael Adams responds that some of the issues don’t relate to access so much as time restrictions on the sites.

By Don Knox, STATE BILL COLORADO
DENVER — Apparently, the Web filters are set a little too tight at Colorado’s capitol.
Some top legislative leaders questioned two top staff members, Michael Adams and Michael Maurer, about a Web-filtering program that prevents or limits state staffers from accessing many e-commerce, video and social-media Web sites.
Many of today’s most useful and relevant sites are getting blacklisted right along with purveyors of pornography and online gambling, several of the legislative leaders noted. (A number of state employees have complained that videos posted at State Bill Colorado also aren’t accessible.)
In the Twitter age, staff members seek to use social-media sites to communicate with constituents but can’t because of the information lockdown.
The situation doesn’t affect legislators because their laptops are not equipped with the filtering program.
Senate Minority Leader and gubernatorial candidate Josh Penry, D-Grand Junction, said his staff said sites that could not be accessed or to which access was limited included document-storehouse Web site Google Docs, video site YouTube and financial site Bloomberg, advocacy organizations including the National Rifle Association and news sites like The Christian Science Monitor.
House Speaker Terrance Carroll said his staff couldn’t access blogs like ColoradoPols, a political Web site.
Senate President Brandon Shaffer, D-Longmont, suggested scrapping the $8,000-a-year filtering program, called Websense, once and for all. He ultimately agreed with the other legislative leaders to leave the current filtering system in place until staff members can come up with a compromise plan at the next meeting of the executive committee of the Legislative Council.
Adams, the legislature’s information director, defended the program, saying it can be tailored to meet changing information needs, allows access based on one’s Capitol functions and keeps employees from wandering into restricted areas.