More on the military's YouTube ban

By at 7:58 am Friday, May 18

Noah Shachtman has posted an update on the US military's recent decision to ban YouTube, MySpace, and the like in warzones. One of the Defense Department's top IT people defended the decision to Noah, saying it had nothing to do with security concerns, and everything to do with bandwidth issues. But then, the same official went on to say that the sites weren't actually a bandwidth issue yet. Snip:
The Defense Department isn't trying to "muzzle" troops by banning YouTube and MySpace on their networks, a top military information technology officer tells DANGER ROOM. Rear Admiral Elizabeth Hight, Deputy Commander of Joint Task Force-Global Network Operations, says that the decision to block access to social networking, video-sharing, and other "recreational" sites is purely at attempt to "preserve military bandwidth for operational missions."

Not that the 11 blocked sites are clogging networks all that much today, she adds. But YouTube, MySpace, and the like "could present a potential problem," at some point in the future. So the military wanted to "get ahead of the problem before it became a problem."

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Xeni Jardin

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