On Thursday The Department of Defense issued a memorandum setting the ground rules for accessing social media sites. All components of the DoD “shall be configured to provide access to Internet-based capabilities” which include “collaborative tools such as SNS [social networking services], social media, user-generated content, social software, e-mail, instant messaging, and discussion forums (e.g., YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Google Apps).”
In short, social media sites shall remain unblocked. The most interesting part of the policy concerns the maintenance of “personal, corporate or subject-specific” blogs, to which the DoD now grants access service-wide. As long as servicemembers pay due respect to operational security, the policy formally allows them to update and run a blog. However, commanders are allowed to temporarily restrict activity to “address bandwidth constraints,” a clause which might prove vague enough to allow arbitrary blocking of sites.
I’m excited that the DoD is defaulting to “yes” when it comes to social media; however, we’ll see how the policy becomes enforced.
