High profile Web sites, such as Boing Boing, Wonkette, and The Onion, are finding that visitors from such diverse places as Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and, er, U.S. military bases in Iraq, can no longer access their sites.

The blocking of all three sites has a common thread. In fact, if you have a Web site, it’s likely your site is tied into this, too.

Now if you search my site for government computer security, you’ll find out it royally sucks. Across the board. Civilian and military. And measures intended to correct the gaping holes have gained mixed results. But, of course, one of the casualties of the War on Hackers is the lowly government employee, or military soldier or sailor.

One of the things the U.S. government has done, across many civilian agencies and military branches, is to implement filtering of Web sites that its internal users are allowed to see. And the Web filter of choice is made by a company called Secure Computing.

Not coincidentally, this is also the company whose software and hardware the United Arab Emirates and Qatar use to filter every Internet user in those countries.

Secure Computing’s SmartFilter technology classifies millions of Web sites into 73 different categories, such as Business, General News, Politics/Opinion, Dating/Social, Criminal Skills, Humor, Profanity, Nudity, and many more. A Web site can be listed in more than one category.

Homeland Stupidity is listed in the Politics/Opinion category, and no others.

The key here is that the end user who purchases the proxy server decides which categories to allow and which to block when setting up and maintaining the equipment. Blocked sites can also be added to a local whitelist for that proxy server, in case users actually do need access to a blocked site.

The furor began a couple of days ago when Boing Boing was added to the Nudity category. As you can imagine, the countries of Qatar and the UAE probably don’t like Internet nudity very much, so they have chosen to block any site in that category. Instead of capitulating to Secure Computing’s demands to redesign their entire Web site to accommodate them, Boing Boing decided instead to “put Secure Computing out of business.”

If that were all there was to it, I wouldn’t bother mentioning it. But in related news, today Wonkette found itself reclassified, added to the Profanity category. And who blocks profanity? Among many others, the U.S. Navy.

“What is this, Red China? What are we fighting for if not the right of all men and women, Iraqi or American, Insurgent or Marine, Sunni, Kurd, or the other one, to hear minute-by-minute updates of Anna Nicole Smith’s appearance before the Supreme Court or read birthday cards to disgraced lobbyists?” wrote whoever is at the helm of Wonkette this week.

(Yes, I cut out the profanity. Editor’s discretion. Suck it.)

Secure Computing does provide a tool which you can use to check your Web site’s categorization in its SmartFilter database. If you disagree with the categorization, you can suggest a change, but Secure Computing can also tell you to go fork yourself. (Suck it.)

Wonkette (Does the ette even apply anymore?) updates, saying that users might be able to use Firefox to bypass the Secure Computing proxy and thereby access blocked sites. No guarantees, though. And that trick definitely won’t work in the UAE or Qatar.