[Infowarrior] - Army Orders Bases to Stop Blocking Twitter, Facebook, Flickr

[Richard Forno]

Danger Room What’s Next in National Security
Army Orders Bases to Stop Blocking Twitter, Facebook, Flickr

     * By Noah Shachtman Email Author
     * June 10, 2009  |
     * 3:13 pm  |

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/06/army-orders-bases-stop-blocking-twitter-facebook-flickr/

The Army has ordered its network managers to give soldiers access to  
social media sites like Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter, Danger Room has  
learned. That move reverses a years-long trend of blocking the web 2.0  
locales on military networks.

Army public affairs managers have worked hard to share the service’s  
stories through social sites like Flickr, Delicious and Vimeo. Links  
to those sites featured prominently on the Army.mil homepage. The Army  
carefully nurtured a Facebook group tens of thousands strong, and  
posted more than 4,100 photos to a Flickr account. Yet the people  
presumably most interested in these sites — the troops — were  
prevented from seeing the material. Many Army bases banned access to  
the social networks.

An operations order from the Army’s 93rd Signal Brigade to all  
domestic Directors of Information Management, or DOIMs, aims to  
correct that. Issued on May 18th “for official use only,” the document  
has not been made public until now.

It is “the intent of senior Army leaders to leverage social media as a  
medium to allow soldiers to ‘tell the Army story’ and to facilitate  
the dissemination of strategic, unclassified information,” says the  
order, obtained by Danger Room. Therefore, “the social media sites  
available from the Army homepage will be made accessible from all  
campus area networks. Additionally, all web-based email will be made  
accessible.”

The operations order (OPORD) doesn’t apply to all GI Bases overseas,  
or those run by the other armed services, which aren’t affected by the  
decree. Nor does the order overturn the long-standing, military-wide  
ban on sites like MySpace, YouTube and Pandora. And it’s almost  
certain some Army posts that still block the now-approved web 2.0  
networks. Still, it’s a click in the right direction for the armed  
service which seems to be making a slow but steady recovery from its  
lingering hostility towards social media.

The full OPORD, after the jump....

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http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/06/army-orders-bases-stop-blocking-twitter-facebook-flickr/