Pentagon Blocked Access to Entertainment Sites

It looks like Pentagon further restricts the way military personnel uses the world wide web. Military personnel and civilian employees will not be able to access YouTube, MySpace, Pandora, Photobucket, hi5, metacafe and several other “recreational Internet sites” (I like the term, by the way) when they are using the Department of Defense network. The full list of websites along with the explanation of the reasons for such a decision can be found in the official Pentagon memo. The cited reason is the bandwidth usage within the DoD networks that could pose “a significant operational security challenge”. Thus, personal computers (or those in Internet cafes) will not be affected by this decision.

It is clear to everyone that the websites above are great traffic and time wasters for any web surfer - military or civilian. And if we view Pentagon as a regular employer, this move is rather understandable. No company wants to pay bandwidth bills when a large portion of traffic is generated by employees entertaining themselves on YouTube. Moreover, who would want an employee to spend the time that is paid for by your company viewing videos on StupidVideos.com?

But I somehow have a strange feeling about this decision anyway. The reason for this strange feeling is rather simple: I can only see video sharing websites in the list, no other traffic wasters like Flickr, for example. And taking into account the recent speculations about the US military to censor blog postings from personnel in Iraq, yesterday's blocking of video sharing websites makes me wonder if this move is intended to further tighten the ability of soldiers in Iraq to show us what actually is going on there. And uploading a video to YouTube is such an easy way to reach thousands of viewers throughout the US and the world. And a video can tell us much more than a pre-approved blog post can. Of course, it is still possible to use a PC in an internet café but are the cafés so easily accessible for a soldier in Iraq or Afganistan?

I only hope I'm wrong in my guess.

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