This morning when I went to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) website I received a disturbing message. It said I needed to be careful because my “Connection was not Private”.
“Attackers might be trying to steal my information from data.BLS.gov.”
Well, that doesn’t sound good. So since that was inside my Chrome browser I figured I should try a different browser to see if it was my problem.
So I tried Firefox and got this:
OK so maybe it’s not hackers just somebody screwed up at the BLS.
Actually, I could get to the home page https://www.bls.gov/ .
I just couldn’t get to any data pages like these:
http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNU04000000
http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CEU0000000001
With a bit more digging around (clicking the “advanced” link) I found that they were pointing their data website (anything that has a URL of “data.bls.gov”) to a security certificate for their beta site. So it is an honest mistake any noob webmaster might make.
Maybe the regular IT guy is away for the the 4th?
But I still needed lots of data from the BLS that I couldn’t get to. So I went totally “oldschool” and called the BLS directly. (This will tell you how old I am but back when I first started publishing InflationData.com I frequently had to call the BLS to get data).
Their phone number by the way is 202-691-6378 not 202-691-6641 like some of their pages say (that is actually a fax number). Their switchboard connected me to an “economist” who helpfully provided me the unemployment numbers I requested and then she laughed when I suggested she notify their IT department of the security certificate issue. (Not sure what that was all about.)
Unfortunately, that was not the end of my trials. I then realized I had not asked for the Employment numbers… DOH! So I tried to work around the problem by getting a PDF from the BLS (which isn’t subject to the security issues) but couldn’t find one with the correct data (old data is archived to PDF but unfortunately current data isn’t or at least I couldn’t get to it). So I called again and spoke with the same switchboard operator and she connected me to another “economist”. This economist seemed a bit frazzled (probably from all the phone calls she was already getting) and I explained the data I needed and she asked if I could get it from the website and I said no and explained the security certificate issue once again. She went to her browser and said OH it’s working fine for me… well of course it is you are INSIDE the building… it isn’t checking your certificate. But she gave me the data I needed and rather than argue I just thanked her and hung up. Lets see how long it takes them to figure out why they are getting so many calls…. I hope they get it fixed before the inflation numbers are released next week or I will have to call them again!
Tim McMahon, editor
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