Air Force Blocks Access to Many Blogs

Noah Shachtman of Wired's Danger Room writes,

The Air Force is tightening restrictions on which blogs its troops can read. At least one senior Air Force official calls the squeeze so "utterly stupid, it makes me want to scream."

Link

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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Songe

Shouldn’t they be watching the airplanes??

“Frist post! lol why you do dat.” tippetty tappety typity.
Takuan

first you tell them they can’t talk, then you tell them they can’t listen – except to you
efergus3

Democracy: Stupidity exhibited at ALL levels of the government.
Thinkerer

Oh c’mon — our military bureaucracy making a self-serving and idiotic decision? No way!
cfpresley

From someone in the Air Force, I can say that blogs have been blocked at the bases I’ve been at for a good while now. This is usually done through nannyware. Why some Berkeley types might be getting up in arms(if they believed in arms), there is a flip side to this. The USAF especially has been squeezed for manning severely, in order to buy shiny F-22′s we’ve had to let people go. We’ve also had to send many to do traditional Army jobs in Iraq, because the Army doesn’t have enough people.

Now with such a limitation on the workforce, do you want US tax dollars spent on work, or Airman Snuffy reading blogs all day? What is not being reported in this posting is that everyone has free time, and there is usually somewhere they can go to read their blogs off the military network. Even if there isn’t, it is still the Military, get rid of your Private Benjamin delusions.
Battlehobo4000

Look at all them chubby Airmen.

-Specialist Battlehobo4000
Wil Wheaton

I’ve heard from some members of the military who can’t read my blog from Iraq or Afghanistan, because it’s censored by the DoD.

Brilliant move there, Pentagon. Freedom is on the march!