Fighting for freedomFollow

But not allowed freedom themselves?

Seriously. . .Myspace?

If I were in Iraqistan fighting for my country, I wouldn't expect this sort of bullShit.

Maybe the naive young soldiers were getting lured into sex traps by dirty old Iraqi men pretending to still be in high school.

Why do you hate our soldiers?

I don't see anything wrong with it. How does it vary from any other employer hiring Websense or some other company to block websites that are distractions to employees at work?

The article doesn't mention it but it is a policy that is DoD wide and meant to keep troops from ******** around while they should be working. Also the bandwidth issue mentioned is valid. Anyone who has used NMCI (Navy/Marine Corps Intranet) can attest to the fact that there isn't much bandwidth available. I don't think the network could support two people trying to use youtube at the same time.

Some employers don't allow you to make personal calls at work, or ever wear pajamas, or eat when you're not on break, and it's usually frowned upon to have sex or ********** at work to. I think that we can safely say that this isn't quite the same. Obviously, if they're bringing a laptop into battle to chat on myspace, maybe that would be of the same logic, but prohibiting someone from accessing it for months and months when it's where your wife hosts videos of the kids for you to see is kinda ******.

Nexa

Katie,

assumptions on the article are bad k? It's not the **** and the military certainly didn't deem it an imminent security risk.

The article is kinda blending two different stories into one. There's a move to prevent the use of military network/computer resources for bandwidth intensive uses (like mysource and youtube). That's purely about resources. If you read the article, it says that soldiers with their own computers are not affected by this restriction. They're free to do whatever they want on their own dime essentially.

The second aspect is that there *is* a movement within the US Army (but only the Army) to attempt to censor information posted from locations like Iraq. This is specifically about blogs and such. The concern there is about operational security, but applies to other areas as well. There have already been a couple instances where families of soldiers have learned about a death from a blog site posted by a friend before the military's official contact occurerd. There's also the potential that innocent-seeming information posted on a blog could give enemies information about troop movements and positions and re-deployments.

The second one is far more controversial. Um, the entire idea that the blogs and such allow too much negative spin is pure red-herring. The overwhelming content coming from soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan is "positive" from the perspective of morale and the military. In fact, it's why the other branches of the military have not yet taken any moves to block blogging. The morale and recruitment benefits of those blogs (getting the "real" story out and not what the media is reporting) is seen to outweigh the potential risks.

Edited, May 15th 2007 4:01pm by gbaji

I find the story especially peculiar (disregarding Gbajis attempt to spin it away from censorship issues, wether they be true or not) when the Pentagon has begun posting its own videos on YouTube.....

Or if you dont believe the Aussies (and who does?) heres the same story from the evertrustworthy Fox...

Its sure gonna suck when you just know you got filmed in a firefight, but you're not even allowed to see your own heroism as filmed by your employer.