Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Censorship Circa 2009

Remember the movie Good Morning Vietnam?
A great Robin Williams film, meant to portray the real story of Adrian Cronauer, sent to Vietnam to improve morale by doing a radio show for the troops. 
There is a part of the movie where Cronauer witnesses the aftermath of  Claymore mine shrapnel devices, at a local restaurant, and the honchos tell him he can not report the incident. 
He gets on air & says "According to the military, absolutely NOTHING happened last night."

Here is a clip of the REAL Adrian Cronauer talking about censorship in the military:


I am bringing all this up because today the Marines, according to WIRED magazine, has banned social networking. 

"The U.S. Marine Corps has banned Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and other social media sites from its networks, effective immediately.

"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," Floyd said.

The Marines say they will issue waivers to the Web 2.0 blockade, if a "mission critical need" can be proven. And they will continue to allow access to the military's internal "SNS-like services." But for most members of the Corps, access to the real, public social networks is now shut off for the next year. "



In classic Government/Military style, while the Marines put a 1 year BAN on social networking capability... the Army recently ordered all U.S. bases to provide access to Facebook. 

When all else fails, manipulate the data. 




2 comments:

Mauigirl said...

That is just bizarre, that one branch of the military does the opposite of the other. And how cruel to our troops fighting abroad if they can't access pictures and share things on social networks.

Fran said...

Hi Maui~ That's the problem-- they can take pictures & share things....unedited from where they are at.

They are thinking it can be intercepted, or give away sensitive info about movement, etc.

But the left hand/right hand issue- not on the same page is classic both military and government snafu.

In fact the word SNAFU came from the military!

Beyond this limited access (I think they still have e mail when they can access computers, but that can be regulated & monitored by the military).

Notice in Iran- when there was a media blackout post election, Twitter & the like were the way for them to communicate & send footage of what was going on.