The bad guys are watching...
Rather than embracing new media and trying to win in the information battlefield, our leadership continues to try and control access to information.
While the enemy has freedom of action within cyberspace, we continue to cripple our own efforts.
Does anyone still wonder why we continue to lose the information war?
The bad guys are watching...
Soldiers can go wherever they want on their own computers...but they shouldn’t be going to places like MySpace on DOD computers.
“The sites covered by the ban are the video-sharing sites YouTube, Metacafe, IFilm, StupidVideos and FileCabi; social networking sites MySpace, BlackPlanet and Hi5; music sites Pandora, MTV, 1.fm and live365; and the photo-sharing site Photobucket.”
**Dons flameproof suit**
I think it has less to do with what our military is posting and way more to do with what they are doing on government time. While it does suck that the guys in Iraq or Afghanistan can’t access it overseas as a connection to home, it seems that an all or nothing approach is what they are going for. I am sure that a portion of our military is monitoring the sites for any information that would be helpful. But let’s be honest; there is nothing on Youtube or Myspace, etc that these guys are missing out on that would be imperative to their job performance.
If you want to place blame, place it on the members that abused it to the point where it has come to this. Plenty of private companies ban these sites from their company networks. This isn’t really any different.
There’s only so much bandwidth on a connection. YouTube and MySpace won’t kill terrorists. The other stuff will.
So Senator Turbin, how long have you been posting as "subbob"?
“We’re here to preserve democracy, not practice it.”....Gene Hackman as commander of USS Alabama in “Crimson Tide”
The best long term solution will be a private-paramilitary network run much like the USO. Call it the “military entertainment Internet”, and designed for high bandwidth use on off-duty times.
It could be affiliated with the military club system and have a military censor assigned to it, authorized to review any material and make a determination before it is posted, instead of leaving it up to individual commands.
There are very practical reasons for keeping a system like this independent of the DOD network, but it will just keep growing like all other networks.
I can imagine in the future an easy to use videophone so that soldiers can contact their families every day.