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US Marine Corps Bans Social Networking Sites
Q-Hack! writes "Citing security concerns, the United States Marine Corps has issued an order banning access to social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter on its network for the next year. The Pentagon is now reviewing its social networking policy for the entire Department of Defense, which should be completed by the end of September, according to a report from CNN. The policy for the entire military is somewhat fragmented, as the Army ordered military bases to allow access to social media sites in May."
My grandfather was a Marine in Korea and moved up the ranks from enlisted to officer very quickly. When I asked him once how he got to be an officer so fast he joked (I *hope* he was joking, anyway) that any Marine who could read and write was immediately promoted to officer. On the other hand, considering the level of discourse on most social networks, maybe modern Marines are better off not refining their writing skills there anyway.
However, it does seem bizarre that guys who are entrusted to carry loaded automatic weapons around (and use them), aren't trusted to write a tweet to their buddies back home. A guy is given the power to shoot people, but not to blog or buy a beer (if he's under 21). Seems like a mixed message.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I guess the real question is who they define "on its network." Major systems, I can see this. A personal laptop? Not so much...
Why isn't this tagged YRO? Or have we just tacitly accepted that soldiers have no rights?
...Two words combined that can't make sense
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
A Marine buddy of mine just posted this on Facebook yesterday.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
...that's at least what the guy from Military Intelligence told us in a crash course on counter espionage in the middle of the cold war one long and grey german winter evenig. Somewhere somebody draws a big picture from all the minute details form hundreds of conversations: Troop displacement, how many sick, morale, comabt readiness and so on and so forth.Sounded a bit over the top, but made sense. What cost the KGB during the cold war at least a couple of drinks you can have today for a few lines of code. I have not made the experiment myself, but I'll bet that you can create a pretty acurate picture about which american or british unit operates where in Afghanistan and Irak. I think it makes sense: Do not blog, while in combat. Come home healthy and alive, write memoirs, bore your grandkids.
This only makes perfect sense. It is best for national security purposes. The next crucial step would be an official policy banning P2P software at the military.
I'm sure there are many marine corps wives that are going to be rather upset at this one. If you thought that the marines were dangerous overseas, wait till the wives show up at the Pentagon demanding answers.
Where is that?
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
Wow! I wonder how many bases didn't already have it blocked on their firewall. I'm guessing 100%. Mine did.
Whale
I've been at the NIH for two years, and they've banned all of these sites ever since I've been here. I was told that it was to prevent the wasting of tax payer money, but security concerns are an equally good justification. This really isn't a big deal. Corporations must do this too. Nothing more.
EXACTLY!
One of the more fascinating things coming out of intelligence circles today is how much we are learning from those minute details, and how much of that data we are releasing to the press. Things like being able to tell how old video of Kim Jong Il is by looking at foliage in the background, or what time of day a Bin Laden tape was filmed (notice that those videos are all against a white sheet, or in windowless rooms now). I bet you could even identify a particular camcorder model (or even unit) by the noise it introduces into a tape.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
I'm in the Air Force and sites like these have always been blocked from the network. I'm free to use them at home, but not at work. Which is fine. I should be working, anyway. These computers are government owned. Before you log on, they explicatly tell you that the computers are for official business only. The taxpayers are not paying for computers for me to go check my personal e-mail or write stupid stuff to friends of mine on Myspace, Facebook or Twitter. They're paying for the computers to be used to get work accomplished.
That's what our home/library/Internet cafe computers are for. I'm surprised the USMC wasn't already blocking them.
I would but I have no mod points today.
Even stateside internet access from the barracks is direct to an ISP (you usually dont get a choice which one) and paid for monthly by the individiual troops, who can do whatever they want with it. On the "corporate" military network what you are allowed to do has always been regulated. While the "corporate" network is primarily For Official Use Only, some personal use (email, web browsing while "off duty") has always been allowed. All this regulation does it tighten up what is considered acceptable personal use.
This is more about controlling the message to the populace than protecting the troops. In order to keep public support, you have to present a nice rosy picture that has nothing to do with the realities on the ground. This is just another measure the Pentagon is taking to make sure they can lie about their progress and not get called on it.
If the American public read the diaries of combat troops, the war would end in a heartbeat. Having a general pointing at a map and rattling off statistics is an entirely different experience than reading about how a kid who's barely out of high school doesn't want to die, and is nearly cracking under the pressure of killing people in a country he couldn't point to on a map a year earlier.
The war on terrorism is a complete joke. It's like a war on blitzkrieg offensives or the war on shock and awe. You can't defeat a tactic. We will continue to lose it because there is no attainable mission. There is no end game. Only endless war.
Once you start legitimizing the insane ramblings of jihadists by referring to good and evil, you lose. They have millions of people they can convince to fight to the death, especially when you're a foreigner treading on someone else's soil. The cost of deploying a peasant to a part of his own country with a box of ammo and a Kalishnikov might as well be zero.
For a good talk on the subject, check this out. It's good, but any rhetoric watched thereafter will make your blood boil.
how many people get from clicking links on myspace?
do you want malware infesting computers used by our military?
And then proceed to say that they include
Though it seems that even sites like slashdot could be grouped under that definition. For that matter other sites like wnd.com or the Huffington post could potentially be grouped similarly.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Facebook applications are one big, festering security breach.
This is old news. A Jarhead buddy of mine tweeted me about it the other day.
I publish www.eDodo.org a humor site for Air Force Academy graduates and cadets. Of course, the Academy blocks us. It's a tricky issue, but the bottom line is that the cadet dorms are gov't property and they use a gov't network, so USAFA gets to filter them.
The original Dodo magazine was an uncensored cadet publication. When the administration started censoring it, eDodo.org was born. I'm hoping more and more cadets get internet enabled smart phones to access the "free" internet.
Back to the topic: The Academy doesn't block Facebook, and that's how we reach cadets now: www.Facebook.com/eDodo
Bigtime Consulting - "We're the best because we cost the most"
You can put the law on the books, but enforcing it is another matter.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
The ironic thing is just last week we had a military official do a keynote address at Blackhat, and they stressed how important the internet was to the morale and effectiveness of their troops, and not just for operational needs, but social ones.
The official said, (paraphrasing) that they had talked to a carrier Captain and asked him what the most important system on the ship was. He said the internet, and pointed out that the average age of his sailors was 18.5.
I find it ironic that on the heels of this talk, we see this.
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
A Marine friend informed me that this network access policy announcement completely conflicts with a new order for Marine recruiters that came out a few weeks prior to this message informing the recruiters to begin using social networking sites as a medium to tell the story of the Corps. In addition, Marine Corps News and Public Affairs have fully embraced social networking sites, and they have instructed their units to begin utilizing these sites as well. So if these commands have been instructed to utilize social networking sites, how are they going to be able to follow these orders if they will not be able to access those sites from their own office? Seems like there has been a breakdown in internal communication when it comes to creating policy within the Corps...
The Marines are the dumb jock force. The idea that one of them knows how to use the Internet is laughable!
Air Force are smart (got to be to fly planes), Navy less so, but still up there (you don't trust dummies to navigate thousands of miles from land), Army so so (they do have the core of engineers, you know), but Marines are just dumb jocks who serve our country by taking the bullets so the rest of the forces can actually win our battles.
The Coast Guard isn't a real force, they just do token drug busts and rescue the occasional dumbass that swims too far.
... a simple written letter is a bit harder for a foreign nation to get its hands on...
Yet they where were censored in the past. My grandmother saved the letters she received from her brothers during World War 2. Some letters have black ink painted over some text and other letters literally had scissors taken to them resulting in some text being carefully cut out. We don't have the human resources, nor is AI capable enough, to censor posts to social networks. Offhand I can't think of a better solution than kill the connection.
While the USMC policy may seem like they are overdoing it given the nature of today's enemies keep in mind that they are developing a general policy that takes into consideration larger and more capable potential enemies of tomorrow. Data mining social network sites could be incredibly valuable. Look at what the British did with Enigma during WW2 with their decoding of every German communication, things like so and so going somewhere for training, being transfered to another unit, ... Little things like this added up and formed a mosaic of a larger picture, it helped. Social networks could be a similar information source, one that is plain text.
When I was deployed we had a U2 crash very near our base where it was scheduled to land. We weren't allowed to tell anyone about it, not even that it had happened. By the time I got off my shift that evening CNN had an article about who what when where and speculating on why.
"Not only will we keep you in a baking hot desert for years on end, but you won't be able to chat with any of your friends back home."
I guess they are pretty confident they don't need any more troops. They can stop recruiting at high schools then, right?
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
One thing I've been curious about is whether guidance is provided to military personnel when posting anything on the internet. Just curious, since I've witnessed a few pretty heated debates between military personnel and civilians on some Canadian sites.
The private sector generally frowns on this sort of thing and it gives PR departments nightmares, although it's tough for them to control. For soldiers, I'd think the military would be keen to make sure a common message is being relayed, no? Certainly not saying they should enforce anything, just wondering if there's any 'code of conduct' of sorts when posting on public sites.
It's on America's tortured brow, That Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow
the rest of the world made them illegal too.
I didn't say anything about anyone pissing in their pants. 20% of returning Marines have serious mental health problems, whatever their performance was on the ground. Until now, they have been mostly recycled back into duty without treatment, since there aren't enough people signing up. So much so, Marines are still subject to stop loss. Doesn't sound like a volunteer force to me.
If there's any other propaganda you'd like to regurgitate, though, please feel free. I mean, as long as you have permission to do so.
And by the way, perhaps I would piss in my pants in that situation. I don't know, since I've never been in a war. But I also wouldn't sign up for any theater the US is engaged in, since it offers no benefit for our security or for anyone else's freedom.
This reminds me of a /. poster a year back, who started rattling on about an intel-related capability on a US Army system he worked with. I went for Score: Funny while needling him for poor OPSEC, and he went off on me in a follow-up post, to the effect that surely he wasn't the first person to mention such-and-such general capability.
I did a couple of things: remind him more forcefully of his OPSEC responsibilities, and based on his Slashdot nick, do some research. By that time, he seemed to have gotten the message, and had gotten rid of his /. user page. Not so fast brother, retrieving it from Google cache. Within maybe 15 minutes, I was able to find:
- his unit, and current location of said unit in Germany
- where his unit had deployed in Kuwait within the year
- his rank and specialty
- his photo
- his CO, and POC for his system security ISSM
- his family, and a number of his associates back in the US
What really tied it together was using the same email address for his MySpace account. Now, in an of itself, this wasn't the end of the world. But, at the very least I could have ensured a visit from a superior, or (if I was a foreign intel agent) filled in a record in my opposing forces database, and started working some social engineering scenarios.
And all for a passing mention in /.
My grandfather was a Marine in Korea ... ... it does seem bizarre that guys who are entrusted to carry loaded automatic weapons around (and use them), aren't trusted to write a tweet to their buddies back home.
Ask him if his letters were censored. My grandmother saved the letters she received from her brothers during World War 2. Some letters have black ink painted over some text and other letters literally had scissors taken to them resulting in some text being carefully cut out. We don't have the human resources, nor is AI capable enough, to censor posts to social networks. Offhand I can't think of a better solution than kill the connection. While the USMC policy may seem like they are overdoing it given the nature of today's enemies, keep in mind that they are developing a general policy that takes into consideration he larger and more capable potential enemies of tomorrow. Data mining social network sites could be incredibly valuable. Look at what the British did with Enigma during WW2 with their decoding of every German communication, things like so and so going somewhere for training, being transfered to another unit, ... Little things like this added up and formed a mosaic of a larger picture, it helped. Social networks could be a similar information source, one that is plain text.
Doesn't look like they'll have anything to do anymore.
Sometimes, the answer is to just destroy it all.
Oh my, what timing! The military needs to deploy these propaganda posters immediately!: "War propaganda for the new millennium" http://www.flickr.com/photos/doctabu/sets/72157620497679512/
There shouldn't be a problem with personal blogs or social networking, as long as they don't identify themselves as members of the military and restrict any comments about the government and its officials, the military, and their locations when deployed.
I don't think it's about outbound information, it's about inbound.
There's a reason to separate military people from their friends and family - close contact is going to make them harder to control, and less likely to follow orders.
This may not be an unreasonable decision for the Marine Corps - it's just such a lame pansy excuse to blame Twitter for internal trojan propagation. How about your IT guys do their jobs and deploy secure machines on secure networks?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
according to SecDef Gates, currently the Army is the only service that uses the stop-loss program. As of January, 13,217 soldiers had tours extended under the stop-loss policy.
The Marines have met their recruiting quotas for the last several years, as has the Air Force. The Army has not.
I see, so when the Iranians protested the election results and exposing the criminal gangster regime for its crimes a month ago, the US government criticized Ahmadinejad for infringing on people's freedom of expression. Now that the USMC wants to disrupt social networking site access for its employees (read "slaves"), the explanation is called "security concerns". This is so typical of our gangster government. The only difference between the US and Iranian governments is that the Iranian government doesn't put an extra effort to cover up its illegitimacy.
I joined the Marine Corps just over a year ago, and one thing they taught us in recruit training is that anytime the name Marine occurs in a news story, there will be a huge blowup over the issue, and the fact that the marines are involved. For example, if an army soldier gets in trouble, they say Private Whomever. If a marine gets in trouble, the headline goes something like, "MARINE GETS DUI" or "MARINE BEATS HIS WIFE". This story definately highlights that point. They have banned social networking sites on their own intranet. They have not banned me from viewing such sites via other means. Many of my fellow marines who have deployed tell me about how they can to to a USO or MCCS tent and do pretty much what they want on the internet while deployed (depending on availability, of course). Hell if i remember correctly, when i used to work for G.E., they did similar things on their intranet, and that was 10 years ago. No one made too much noise about it then, probably because it wasn't the marine corps.
The biggest reason with social networking and the military is that when a service member dies, his buddies tweet, facebook,etc. before the military has enough time to contact the next of kin. You guys can see the problem here. The other reason, is when the service member drops clues to his next mission, ie, "tomorrow is another big day, going to ______." And if the enemy wants to see what they are up against, all they have to do is look in the photos of weapon systems.
Consider the networking software law enforcement uses to create charts of the relationships of bad guys. Such software is, in a manner of speaking, like the reciprocal of a networking site. When you aggregate a person's friends you have much of use about the private person, that is, the real person. In a networking site the network of contacts is fully exposed instead of being teased out of investigative data. Things that are usually hard to find out about a person are made very easy.
Soldiers are by nature involved in many classified things. A person's social site contacts can tell the thoughtful investigator (this time a bad guy) much. They could expose compromising relationships. Or questionable activities. Even the appearance of impropriety might give a bad guy undue leverage. Look at this kerfuffle over the new MI6 chief And to think his wife posted with no privacy settings at all. Admittedly this was not compromising, just insecure, embarrassing, and possibly dangerous for her very own family. People with classified access should think long and hard about what they do with these admittedly appealing and engaging (for some) social networking resources.
On the other hand, having such a site makes life very easy for security clearance investigators and potential employers.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
I didn't knew Alkaeda and Oosama were scanning/browsing twitter and Fbuk for information...
I'm reminded of a scene in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series in the book "The Path of Daggers".
One of the main character's scouts returns from a reconnaissance mission stating that the enemy force was mobilizing towards them. When sneered at by one of his compatriots as to how he must be a mind reader he responds with-
"If any of the men I talked to knew where they're going next, they didn't say, and I didn't ask, but they were willing to complain over a mug of ale about marching all the time and never standing still."
Just by listening to what the people say and what the people don't say, looks like you can form a decent picture as to what the higher ups are thinking.
What they mean by "Security Concerns" is military members at deployed locations putting out information that might be pieced together. What might seem harmless can alot of times be used to target the troops. If I posted that I went on Convoy today from base a to base b and then next week I did the same thing. Chances are I would be doing it the week after that as well and would make for a very easy target. Thats what they are trying to avoid.
My friend in the army (stationed in Iraq) told me a couple months ago the way the insurgents were assassinating some soldiers was by using information from sites like myspace and facebook. I'm not surprised at all that this rule has been adopted.