When the Marine Corps doesn’t like something the tendency is to try and kill it. Unfortunately, the Marine Corps fails to understand that information wants to be free.
“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,” reads aMarine Corps 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 Marines’ ban will last a year. It was drawn up in response to a late July warning from 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. Scams, worms, and Trojans often spread unchecked throughout social media sites, passed along from one online friend to the next. “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 Danger Room.
This kind of approach just makes the people inside an organization expend inordinate amounts of energy finding new networks that avoid the silly rules and bans. It also discourages the younger crowd from sticking around. Can you say mission failure? Meanwhile, the public gets the idea that the U.S. military has something to hide.
“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.”
Can anyone tell me of a single battle that has been lost due to social networking? How about a single life lost directly due to “information leakage” related to Facebook, MySpace or Twitter? Certainly
I have no idea what a social media czar is but I’m thinking that the Federal Government needs a new annual convention – it can be called Flock of Czars. It will give all the Web 2.0 pundits something new to make fun of. The sad thing is that people who have decided on a military career are stuck with this sort of foolishness until there is a sea change in the level of blind authoritarianism. These arbitrary social networking bans and information non-distribution policies can cripple information operations related to winning the proverbial hearts and minds. Modern war, we’re told, is based on winning hearts and minds. I guess we’re losing.