I don’t know why, but since last night, the American Spectator’s website at spectator.org has been blocked for being a “reported attack site”:

Fortunately, perhaps, Google provides diagnostic tools for those curious about where the site has gone:

Alas, I don’t know enough about network security to make a diagnosis. (Dammit Jim, I’m a private eye, not a doctor.)
As of this morning, I can get the website to load in Safari but not in Firefox 3, albeit intermittently. The front page is accessible, but when I try to visit the blog, I get this instead:

In the past, Google has been accused of removing conservative-aligned content from YouTube and from Google News, but I see no evidence that this is what’s happened this time. I’m not even quite sure why Google is responsible for making this call or providing these diagnostics.
What’s most likely is the Spectator’s webmaster left a security hole unplugged and the site was taken advantage of by opportunistic spammers, which is something of a tautology.
I’ve put an e-mail in to a contact at the Spectator, and if I find out what happened, I’ll provide an update in this post.
Update: Looks like I called it. The site still isn’t working for me in Firefox, but via Safari, they offer this explanation:
We have received a number of inquiries regarding the fact that Spectator.org has been designated a “harmful site” by Google, because of outside entities attempting to use our site to distribute malicious software. We have been working with our Web hosting company to address the issue, and believe that it has been resolved and that our site is safe to visit, though there is a lag time before Google can remove the “harmful site” status. In the meantime, if you normally find us via Google, you can still visit us by typing Spectator.org directly into your browser, or by entering our site via Yahoo. Thank you for your understanding.






