I refer the hon. Member to the answer provided by the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster to my hon. Friend the Member for Luton, South (Margaret Moran) on 5 February 2009, Official Report, column 142W.
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) complies with the policies set out in the Government’s Security Policy Framework (SPF), particularly Mandatory Requirement (MR) 39. MR 39 requires Departments to comply with the requirements of any Codes of Connection, including technical and procedural policies to manage the risks posed by all forms of malicious software.
The number of websites covered by this policy is large and is kept under constant review. It is therefore not practical to provide an exhaustive list of all websites blocked. However, access to the following categories of website are banned in order to comply with the SPF, the FCO’s Acceptable Use Policy and to control bandwidth demands on the FCO’s corporate infrastructure:
those that contain viruses, trojans or other malicious software;
sites that by-pass anti-virus defences;
pornography and hate sites;
gaming, gambling and social networking sites;
bandwidth intensive sites which place excessive demands on the FCO’s corporate infrastructure.
The FCO will consider requests to access sites that fall under banned categories if there is a strong business need for them and they do not pose a risk to the corporate network.