Slashdot Mirror
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.
...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.
Marines are not soldiers. It's like calling someone who writes malicious code a hacker. Or something.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Because they signed on the dotted line to uphold and defend the Constitution, they lose part of their free speech. The Uniform Code of Military Justice has clauses in it that make it a prohibit things like participating in rallies in uniform. The military is an extension of the government, therefore its members cannot "make statements." Official statements must come from the Public Relations officers. Anything else can and will be subject to censorship. Any ill spoken of the President is speaking ill of your commanding officer. It doesn't matter if you like him or not, he is your Commander-in-Chief. Don't put a bumper sticker (pro or anti) about a politician on your car if you're in the military either. Note that military service members are not prohibited from writing to their congresscritters. They are also allowed to vote. They are not permitted to run for office other than a local one (same goes for Reserve and Guard members). They are not permitted to campaign for a candidate at least while in uniform... I don't remember about out of uniform.
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.
OCO is Loco
I lived on a USMC base overseas for a number of years. Overseas, most US Service members live on the actual base. But they can buy internet, cable tv, and telephone service from private ISPs. The private ISPs, generally, don't block anything and the logs are not usually reviewed by US Government representatives.
However, when the Marines are at work, they login to a US Government network. This network is firewalled and proxied at the base level. Base leaders decide what gets filtered here. Outside of the Base proxy, there is usually another Command level proxy or firewall. This is managed by (in the case of the USMC), the MC NOSC.
So, at work, twitter and facebook are directed to be blocked. However, I've never seen a military network where facebook and twitter were allowed. So this order is nothing new; just codifying curreny, unwritten, policy.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
It's blocked on their network. Let me just tell you the kind of Hell you'd get if you plugged your personal laptop into a DoD network. Twitter will be the least of your worries. Since most DoD networks port lock all access (if no computer is currently authorized for that port, it's turned off. When a computer is authorized for that port, its MAC is registered at the switch and no other machines will work) it wouldn't much matter any way. You couldn't go anywhere even if you did plug in your laptop, but it would still get you in trouble if they found out you did it.
Internet in barrack, apartments, and base housing is normal ISP provided Internet with no funky DoD stuff involved. That is not blocked in any way (unless, you know, your ISP is blocking p2p or something). We even had satellite service set up in our housing in Baghdad to give us unfettered civilian access to the 'Net during downtime. We paid for it from a local company and split it among enough people to make it reasonable. I would not have wanted to play WoW across it, but it did fine for IM, web browsing, and e-mail.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Personal equipment is not permitted on any DoD network by policy, only GFE (Government Furnished Equipment) is permitted. However, depending on the technical solutions in place, it may be possible to connect anything you want, but that could result in severe repercussions should the user get caught.
I can tell you that the major DoD facilities in the Washington DC area use port security and disable all ports by default, only enabling them when needed after the appropriate change request has been made and approved, with justification provided.
As for the original post, it is the Marines network, they can chose whatever to permit or deny at their own discretion, limited personal use is a luxury on government (and even corporate) networks, not a right. If they want, they can remove all outside access, and there is nothing you can do about it, short of quitting (not really an option for some military folks).
Also, as someone else stated, social network sights can result in breaches of security, even unintentional, but at the same time, so can most forums of any type (car, geek, hobby, etc). The ideal solution is of course training your personnel, but sometimes, even the best measures will fail, humans are not perfect, so the best way to prevent disclosure (not to mention that all those lovely facebook apps have access to all your personal info which in of itself could be conceived as a risk depending on your rank or position) or possible infection (how many virus's/trojans have been released due to advertiser sites being compromised, but in that case, it also affects every other site that uses the advertiser), is to remove the potential threat.
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
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.
Two things:
1) They are blocking these sites on GOVERNMENT NETWORKS. This is no different than your company blocking Twitter. These Marines remain perfectly free to use personal Internet connections however they see fit, assuming they don't pass on classified information. You do not rely upon government networks to provide you Internet access in barracks or housing. Even in Baghdad we had civilian Internet connections available to us.
2) Soldiers, Marines, Sailors, and Airmen do have rights, but not quite the same rights as you and I. When you join the military you contractually exchange your Constitutional rights for the rights granted by a code called the "Uniform Code of Military Justice" or UCMJ. You have most of the same rights as any civilian, but some are modified or taken away based on the realities of military operations. Upon leaving the service or existing active duty, you revert to the normal rights of citizens. The UCMJ is generally fair, and grants MOST Constitutional rights to service people, but one area where it is more restrictive than usual is Free Speech. You simply have more limited speech rights in the military than you do as a civilian. You agree to this as part of signing up.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Then again, when your military consists mainly of Mexican thugs looking for weapons training and inbred hicks from Arkansas, maybe they aren't in a position to make intelligent decisions.
Wow, you are a fucking asshole, do you realize that? The military is one of the most diverse parts of American society. Take any reasonably sized military unit and odds are that you can find a service member from each of the 50 states, from each religion (ranging from the big three to smaller groups such as wiccans) and ethic group.
The military isn't perfect but to claim that it's only made up of "inbred hicks" is absurd. I'd like to see you have the balls to make that statement on the street anywhere in the United States as opposed to making it as an anonymous coward on /.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
It's just a fact of defending the Constitution, you are bound by the regulations of the service you joined; very few service people realize that your rights are suspended when they join up. Given they are citing security concerns, I don't see the problem. If they were trying to ban total access to social networking sites on and off-duty, they can do it.
The patriot volunteer, fighting for country and his rights, makes the most reliable soldier on earth. (Stonewall Jackson
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.
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"
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.
Uh, sorry, that's really not an accurate reflection of the Marine Corps. More like a form of projection of yourself. Marines are re-enlisting at all-time high rates. This is a volunteer force who signed up in a time of war. They signed up for action and got it. Maybe you'd be pissing your pants in fear, but don't project that on the Marines.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
You really are a poorly read bigot, you know that? A study was recently done on the demographics of the U.S. military, and to the author's surprise, every socio-economic, geographic, racial, ethnic, religious, and gender group was represented in the military to a rough extent to its proportion in American society. Except one.
Northeastern liberals were very underrepresented. Thankfully, people like you probably are, too.
I find the GPs attitude very common among those who have little/no exposure to the military. Having been an officer in the Air Force, and having gone to college three times now (once for undergrad, twice for advanced degrees), I would say this: If you told me my very life depended upon an utter stranger doing a job properly, and my choices were between an enlisted person in the US military and a college undergrad - and that is the only information I would get - I'm going with the enlisted military. Shit, it's not even close.
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.
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.