US military prohibits 13 Websites

Just weeks after restricting soldier’s blogs, the US Department of Defense has banned the use of You Tube and My Space for reasons of strained network capabilities and present operational risks as revealed by a memo issued by a high-ranking Army official on Friday.

The memo states that the soldiers cannot access such social networking and recreational sites through military networks, which is the only line of communication for the overseas soldiers, and decides to block 11 such more sites (barring the gaming sites) which include video-sharing sites Metacafe, IFilm, StupidVideos and FileCabi; social networking sites BlackPlanet and Hi5; music sites Pandora, MTV, 1.fm, live365 Internet Radio; and the photo-sharing site Photobucket. All such sites allow the army men to socialize with family and friends and any kind of carelessness can jeopardize lives as well as military operations.

These sites can however be accessed by them from their home networks.

"However, if you access such sites using your personal home computer, you should exercise caution in forwarding any links or files from these sites to DoD computers or networks," US Gen. B.B. Bell explained in his widely-distributed memo from Korea.

Bell cited official network and bandwidth availability as the primary reasons and emphasized that the soldiers must remain vigilant and cautious while sending personal videos, photos and data files and must not in any case disclose any confidential information otherwise operational security (OPSEC) shall be endangered which gives way to identity theft, hacking and virus attack.

Ban on such large social networking and media sharing sites intends to free the jammed military connections due to data rich upload and download of videos, photos etc. as was said by the Defense Department spokesman Commander Jeffrey Gordon.

Critics of the policy substantiate their stand by saying that such sites are the only way of keeping in touch with family and friends as well as a news source for the troops and the government network is the only line of communication for the soldiers in foreign countries thus affecting almost 3 million employees.

The Directive issued on April, 19 stating the ban on posting blogs and sending personal e-mails without a prior supervision of the content by a senior was considered to be the sharpest restriction on troops’ online activities since the start of the Iraq war.

Apart from this the American military in Iraq and Afghanistan are strictly forbidden to consume alcohol due to increase in growing number of crimes committed by these troops.