E-Media Tidbits

Soldier's Media Center, via Flickr. It's a good thing the military hasn't blocked access to Flickr yet, since the U.S. Army distributes photos there.

The U.S. Defense Department has begun to block access on its computers to (currently) 13 social networking sites, including YouTube and MySpace, according to a Tuesday Washington Post story by Alan Sipress and Sam Diaz.

These sites are some of the most popular online ties "linking U.S. troops in combat areas to their far-flung relatives and friends ...depriving soldiers of a favorite diversion from the boredom of overseas duty," according to the reporters.

The banned sites allow users to share photographs, videos and audio recordings. Others banned sites include Photobucket, Metacafe, MTV, iFilm, Hi5, Pandora, Live365, BlackPlanet, 1.FM, StupidVideos and Filecabi.

The military claims this is about bandwidth, although security seems to be an issue as well. "The idea behind it is to have the bandwidth available to mission-critical areas," said Navy Lt. Denver Applehans, a spokesman for U.S. Strategic Command, which oversees the task force that designed the restrictions, in the Post story.

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In a memorandum to troops last Friday, Gen. B.B. Bell, commander of U.S. forces in South Korea, said the task force had noted "a significant increase in the use of DoD network resources tied up by individuals visiting certain recreational Internet sites" and that the traffic poses "a significant operational security challenge."

For American soldiers, this makes home that much farther away. For me, I remember the sense of uneasiness, if not surprise, when I found certainsites blocked while visiting the United Arab Emirates. Censorship during war is not uncommon or unexpected, but blocking entire sites is a new kind of censorship for American soldiers, their families and their friends.