The Department of Defense (DoD) has banned their employees (civilian and military alike) from accessing popular sites such as Youtube, MySpace and other social networking or high traffic sites according to The Inquirer.

Let the conspiracy theories begin. We know that personnel stationed abroad have been unable to access some of these very same sites for quite some time and now the ban has been extended to the home front as well. Is the military trying to censor what the civilians and soldiers employed by them do and post online? I doubt it.

Don’t forget today is the day that internet providers in the US have to comply with a new policy to install FBI spy gear on their networks. Could these two things be related? Debate amongst yourselves, I am not here to untie the knots our government ties around us.

The DoD claims that if they continued to allow access to those sites, bandwidth costs would go through the roof. As it stands now it is just causing inconveniences for various high ranking officials such as slow loading emails or video conferences and is that stuff really that important.

I say it’s not. I think they should be able to access those sites because if you are working in any non-combat zone there is basically nothing to do all day except for your real work and let’s be honest, you finish that in three hours or less.

To ban all social networking sites, that hasn’t happened yet but that would raise a red flag with me.

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Entry was posted on Monday, May 14th, 2007 at 4:32 am under YouTube.

Read more entries by Jonathan Schlaffer.
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