U.S. troops cleared for social networking
The U.S. Department of Defense has finally got its act together and forged a new, all-encompassing policy regarding attitudes towards social networking services and Web applications. This means U.S. troops are now free to play on sites such as Facebook and Twitter without fear or reprisal.
The United States armed forces have up to now had a strange relationship with social networking. Some commands have embraced it, believing sites such as Facebook and Twitter to be a positive force on the men and women fighting for them, while others have shunned it, believing the security risks outweigh any good that may come from such trivial endeavors.
Both sides of the argument have a point.
On the one hand social networking sites enable the armed forces to recruit new members and show off its good rather than bad side. They also allow the troops who are risking their lives to communicate with each other and their friends and families back home in a very simple and honest way.
But there are obvious security risks to having troops talking about what they are doing or where they are based on these often-public networks. With Twitter and Facebook activity beginning to show up in search results this is probably more relevant now than ever.
The U.S. Department of Defense issued a new policy memorandum on Friday which resolved this long-running debate, and the need for openness won out over any security concerns.
David Wennergren, deputy assistant secretary of defence for information technology, told BBC News:
We need to take advantage of these capabilities that are out there – this Web 2.0 phenomena. And what we had were inconsistent approaches. Some websites were blocked and some commands were blocking things.
The idea is be responsible and use these tools to help get the job done. There are two imperatives. One is the ability to share information. The other is about security – we need to be good at both.
While sites previously blocked by some commands such as YouTube and Facebook will now be available once again, the ban still applies to “prohibited content sites (e.g., gambling, pornography, hate-crime related activities)” and access can be revoked for reasons of safeguarding missions or abiding by bandwidth constraints.
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