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.
- Air Force Blocks Access to Many Blogs – Boing Boing
- Why is the US Army internet-blocking Time Warner? – Boing Boing
- More on the military's YouTube ban – Boing Boing
- Air Force Blocks Access to Many Blogs – Boing Boing
- Top US general says: let my soldiers blog. – Boing Boing
- US military censorware's barbed wire funnies – Boing Boing
- The Air Force's rules of engagement for blogging – Boing Boing
- New Army rules may kill milblogs and email from warzones – Boing Boing
- US Army: reporters are "threat," just like Al Qaeda; milblogs …
- Army audits show official sites breach security, not milblogs …
- US Army spamming students by phone, too – Boing Boing
