November 12th, 2008
A year after YouTube ban, Pentagon launches TroopTube
After blocking YouTube from oversease bases last year, the Defense Department has launched TroopTube, as an authorized alternative. It is, the site says:
the new online video site designed to help military families connect and keep in touch while miles apart. The site is designed for easy use, so you can quickly upload videos and share the simple joys of each day with each other, either privately or with the whole world.
To register the site asks you what branch you’re attached to, although it also offers “civilian friend” and “civilian family” as members. Other than a captcha, it doesn’t appear to check your bona fides. I registered as “friend” and presumably Al Qaeda members could do likewise.
The site doesn’t appear to have a lot of uptake yet. Most of the videos I saw were of parades or were messages from commands. I did find one satirical video, in which “Sarge tells the boys about there deployment…or does he???”
AP reports that the site is developed by Delve Networks, which includes technology for optimizing the video served up based on the service member’s Internet speed. They supposedly also have a supercharged search engine.
It pares unimportant words like “this” and “that,” then compares what’s left against a massive database of words commonly uttered in proximity to each other, collected from crawling hundreds of millions of Web pages.
Content is vetted by a Pentagon officials for national security and copyright violations, but my fear is still that the Pentagon won’t be able to resist censoring critical messages, even if they don’t possibly compromise security.
