The few, the proud and the unable to log into social networking sites from their government machines.
The United States Marine Corps has banned access to Facebook, MySpace and Twitter on its networks according to Wired. The ban goes into effect immediately and is being taken largely as a security measure.
“These internet sites in general are a proven haven for malicious actors and content and are particularly high risk due to information exposure, user generated content and targeting by adversaries,” says the order, issued Monday. “The very nature of SNS [social network sites] creates a larger attack and exploitation window, exposes unnecessary information to adversaries and provides an easy conduit for information leakage that puts OPSEC [operational security], COMSEC [communications security], [and] personnel… at an elevated risk of compromise.”
The ban comes in response to a warning in late July by U.S. Strategic Command, which told the rest of the military it was considering a Defense Department-wide ban on the Web 2.0 sites, due to network security concerns. According to Wired, the ban will be in effect for at least a year.
“The mechanisms for social networking were never designed for security and filtering. They make it way too easy for people with bad intentions to push malicious code to unsuspecting users,” a Stratcom source told Wired’s Danger Room.
However, there are other branches of the military and defense department that have embraced social networking and media. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff maintains a Twitter feed with over 2,000 subscribers and some generals in other branches blog from the front lines.
“OPSEC is paramount. We will have procedures in place to deal with that,” Price Floyd, the Pentagon’s newly-appointed social media czar, told Danger Room. “What we can’t do is let security concerns trump doing business. We have to do business… We need to be everywhere men and women in uniform are and the public is. If that’s MySpace and YouTube, that’s where we need to be, too.”
The Marines say they will issue waivers to the Web 2.0 blockade, if a “mission critical need” can be proven. And they will continue to allow access to the military’s internal “SNS-like services.” But for most members of the Corps, access to the real, public social networks is now shut off for the next year.
“Malicious actors”?
With all the people in the world that want to kill our Marines, is the government afraid the next wave of terrorism will be let by Brittney Spears? Serious though, you did mean hackets, right?