US Army censors MySpace, YouTube
p2pnet.net news:- “It’s hard for me to believe that the world’s best-funded military isn’t able to provide decent bandwidth, and censorship is nothing new.”
So says the Angry Lab Rat in a comment post to the p2pnet story on the fact US Forces Korea commander general B.B. Bell has placed a ban on YouTube, MySpace and 11 other sites around the world.
“No, I think the military is more interested in keeping its soldiers from seeing the anti-war videos and the videos put out by the war-ravaged Iraqis,” says our Reader’s Write. “But I feel the morale the military saves by doing so will be greatly overshadowed by the morale lost because soldiers are more out of touch with family.”
Says Lab Rat on his blog:
Today my precious little niece, age 20, ships out to Iraq. She finished army boot camp and MP training a mere 2 weeks ago. She gets a little more training in Kuwait, then it’s off to the horrors of war for her, and she’ll be right in the thick of it. I still see her as a little girl in my mind, so the thought of her going off to kill people in an unjustified quagmire of a war that serves no apparent American interests doesn’t sit well with me, especially since I was one of those folks standing at my courthouse with anti-war signs back when it all started. But it’s the choice she made for herself. All I can do is hope she comes back in one piece, physically and mentally. I don’t want her to join the over 3100 Americans who have been killed, or the tens of thousands who have been seriously wounded.
Of course I hope to keep in touch with her while she’s ‘over there.’ She brought her new laptop computer with her, and has a couple of email addresses and the internet, but she’ll be relying on the army electronic networks to keep in digital contact with us.
Many servicemen and servicewomen and their families use photosharing and video websites, like YouTube, MySpace, and Photobucket, to keep in touch with each other. Consider THIS video from someone to their Uncle Keith in Iraq.
Troops are also able to share their experience with the world at large, such as in THIS footage (’Looks like they blew up the showers again.’), or THIS patriotic footage [riht] of actual fighting.
But the military has decided to make these and many other photo- and video-sharing sites off-limits to their troops using military networks, starting today. Here is the DoD notice to soldiers: .
They say it’s because it slows the system down too much, but you would think the world’s most funded army would be able to have a decent networking system that could handle the bandwidth. They also say they worry about sensitive information being leaked. Maybe they have a point there, but don’t they already censor such things?
No, I think they are afraid more about morale, since a great many videos and photos out there are being put out about the horrors the civilian population are facing (over 600,000 civilians have died, according to one estimate, and over 2.6 million have refugee status according to the U.N.), and increasing numbers of anti-war videos are being published. Here is a good example, but WARNING, it contains very graphic images: HERE. My niece has told me how nearly everyone she has met so far in the military is strongly against the war. And we’re talking about the new recruits, who are supposed to be ‘gung-ho’ fresh from boot camp!
The military’s reaction is strangely hypocritical, since they are posting their own videos on the web, for the sake of recruitment and banging the patriotic drums, even have their own channel on YouTube. It’s a two-way street. As the CNN article says, this war is as much about minds and action as it is about bombs and guns. When the troops aren’t able to broadcast their side of things, all you are left with is official propaganda and the many, many videos put out by the other side.
Oh, well. For now I can still send emails to my niece, at least, as well as standard mail. Let’s hope cooler heads prevail and bring home the troops soon, anyhow.
Bring ‘em home, Bush.
Addendum: On a related note, the U.S. military set up its own YouTube channel just last week, and about a week before that they banned all blog posting by soldiers without express supervisory approval for each post (see blog links at this post). Of course, how many supervisors would allow it, thinking that any perceived slip would fall on their heads? It all adds up to a serious clamp-down on soldier communications while at the same time increasing the military’s propaganda machine.
What’s next? Will the military forbid email? Are the soldiers to be reduced to WWII-era censored snail mail, too? In a weird and scary way, it seems to me that the very people who are supposed to lay their lives on the line for our rights are denied most of those same rights, almost to the level of inmates in our prison system.
Stay tuned.
Also See:
p2pnet – US military bans YouTube, MySpace, May 14, 2007
blog – No Videos For The Troops, May 14, 2007
If your Net access is blocked by goverment restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at thIs the endSurvey: How Did Copyright Infringement Become Equated with Robbery? (of the Net) nigh?zze University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.
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May 15th, 2007 at 10:17 am
The local TV channel said it was just computers owned by the military. Soldiers’ personal computers can still access these sites. Is this true? Of course this could be the begining of more contrl in the future.
May 15th, 2007 at 5:24 pm
It’s nice to try and say they’re censoring the Internet, but the simple fact is that government computers are for government use. If an MP is surfing YouTube, they’re not watching their post. If they’re using a DoD computer, they’re using up resources that can be used for the war.
I had a laptop running clean behind a firewall for over 11 years. You know what did it in? YouTube and MySpace. I no longer use it for anything sensitive because it’s 0wn3d and I don’t feel like wiping it clean to reinstall. Armed Forces IT guys/gals have MUCH better things to do than spend hours untangling an OS ridden from crap picked up from those sites. I would never connect it to a DoD resource (assuming they’d allow) because sensitive information is entered all the time (e.g. your leave request, orders request, emails, etc).
Finally, as Geraldo Rivera illustrated, the best intentions line the path to COMSEC violations. It’s way too easy to comment, “Those idiots missed us today. If they’d evelated only 10 more feet and added a degree to their fix, they’d have actually hit something.” Next day’s headline: Another 10 Marines die in mortar attack. This brings the toll up to X,XXX+10 (since that’s about all the news seems to care about)
LT in the Air Force
May 16th, 2007 at 6:04 pm
Of course that’s right. Why would they block stuff from soldiers’ home computers? Ludicrous. The blocks are on work computers so people will. . .you know. . .work.