Army Orders Bases to Stop Blocking Twitter, Facebook, Flickr

Over at Wired Danger Room, Noah Shachtman -- who has been following this story longer and more closely than any journalist I know -- writes:

The Army has ordered its network managers to give soldiers access to social media sites like Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter, Danger Room has learned. That move reverses a years-long trend of blocking the web 2.0 locales on military networks.

Army public affairs managers have worked hard to share the service's stories through social sites like Flickr, Delicious and Vimeo. Links to those sites featured prominently on the Army.mil homepage. The Army carefully nurtured a Facebook group tens of thousands strong, and posted more than 4,100 photos to a Flickr account. Yet the people presumably most interested in these sites -- the troops -- were prevented from seeing the material. Many Army bases banned access to the social networks.

Read Noah's entire story, along with the full text of the operational order, here.

• [Takuan]

  slowly, gradually they catch on. Sad how those on top of a rigid power hierarchy and entrusted with so much firepower are so dim. Of course they (IF they are smart) can only benefit from open social network access. First it self-reveals internal enemies of the the Agenda so they can be sidetracked, dead-ended or liquidated. Second, it co-opts THEIR sense of empowerment and makes them willing propaganda meme ambassadors. I find it worrisome. When the generals let go of a grain of fear they gain even more influence.

• [Anonymous]

  I’m a former Navy network manager and security supervisor, and while shipboard networking is a lot different than land networking, the single most important reason we often blocked YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, and other sites was solely for bandwidth reasons, not because we didn’t want the sailors using Yahoo. Some of these sites were even blocked when we were out to sea and unblocked when we were in port. I’ve never worked with the Army but if the bases that have blocked these sites are mission-critical sites that use satcom to uplink their signal from wherever they happen to be, blocking is probably a good idea. Some of these connections are still only… well, smaller than you’d expect… they’re primarily there to support the job, and allowing the men and women to surf the Internet is merely a side effect. It’s pretty easy for you to set up a schedule so people back home can e-mail you stuff that you need or want (using your official e-mail account), and that saves room on the connection for little things like finding out who’s on their way to the ship to try to blow us up.

  Understand I’m a staunch fighter for public use and I’ve been against censorship since high school. (And subverted it.) But without knowing all of the facts, it’s hard to see if these blocking efforts were a matter of operational necessity or censorship. Maybe it was a mix of both, but I’d wager that it was more the former. I know that on the Navy base I work at, sites that are banned on work computers (myspace, yahoo!, gmail) are NOT banned on the WiFi nets or on the public use terminals.

  Respectfully
  CJ Casey
  (former) Information Technician Specialist First Class (Surface Warfare)
  2735/ 2779/ 9502 (IT ratings and teacher ratings)

• [catbeller]

  For the sole purpose of blocking criticism of Bush, Cheney, and for mugging the truth of why the troops are where they are.

  The troops still think that they are holding the line on the “terrorists” that attacked us on 9/11/01.

• [silverwink]

  Ive been using http://bit.ly/bJwmma .
  It uses a better procedure than blocking social media sites because it only monitors sites like Twitter during production hours. People/Employees still have the option to use it for a breather or during breaks really . Sometimes they use it for work too in helping reach decisions.

  For me its really unnecessary to block Twitter.