May 14th, 2007
DOD turns off access to YouTube, MySpace, Pandora
Soldiers stationed overseas won't be watching their favorite YouTube videos anytime soon. The Department of Defense has announced it will begin blocking 12 popular websites in order to protect information and reduce drag on the department's networks, reports the Associated Press.
"This recreational traffic impacts our official DoD network and bandwidth ability, while posing a significant operational security challenge," said Gen. B.B. Bell, the U.S. Forces Korea commander in memo.
This announcement comes on the heels of a military announcement that it will begin censoring the content of all electronic communication written by soldiers.
Members of the military can still access the sites on their own computers and networks, but Defense Department computers and networks are the only ones available to many soldiers and sailors in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The banned sites are video 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.
The new ban means that military personnel won't be able to watch or share videos with their friends and families on military computers. Critics of the ban are concerned that the ban will have a the negative effect of suppressing good and bad information from the battlefield.
"This is as much an information war as it is bombs and bullets," he said. "And they are muzzling their best voices," said Noah Shachtman, who runs a national security blog for Wired.
