Pentagon Seals Soldiers Off From Family Photos
| By Graham - May 14th, 2007 at 11:16 am EDT |
| Also listed in: Campus Progress Blog |
NYT's The Lede blog reports:
Among the restricted sites is Photobucket. I don't know about you, but all I ever see there are pictures of family gatherings and new babies. MySpace and YouTube are also banned, along with several other video sites. If they're really short on bandwidth, I can understand cutting YouTube, but c'mon folks. Let's not send our armed forces into conflict and cut them off from a common way of staying in touch with families and friends.The Defense Department has decided to make it impossible to reach 13 Web sites from its network, citing an overabundance of “recreational traffic.”
In the policy released today, General B.B. Bell, commander in South Korea, said use of those sites “impacts our official DoD network and bandwidth ability, while posing a significant operational security challenge.”
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That said, we're supposed to be reconstructing an entire country, and we can't even handle getting enough bandwidth to the soldiers that YouTube isn't a problem?
My guess?
There's something else at work here. YouTube videos are actually very low-quality, not really bandwidth hogs. MySpace and Photobucket, similarly, are likely not placing much of a strain on the DoD's bandwidth.
Sounds more like they don't want the troops spending so much time on the internet.
'cause say you're going off to some base that doesn't have as much internet access, and your wife sends you a photobucket of your brother's new baby. but you can't wait to ask them to put it somewhere else. ugh.
That explanation doesn't fit with the fact pattern here. If they don't want the service members telling unflattering stories to the folks back home, how will blocking MySpace do anything if they're not blocking e-mail?
I used to be a member of a message board where soldiers in Iraq would post pictures they'd taken of anything and everything, some of which were unimaginably gory. This new regulation wouldn't stop them from doing that, or attaching those pictures to an e-mail.