Wait a minute.......

[patgund]

blink.....blink.....blink....

US military takes Iraq war to YouTube (BBC News, May 11th, 2007)

"The US military has taken the war in Iraq into cyberspace, with the launch of its own channel on the video-sharing website YouTube.

Its 25 brief clips include footage of US soldiers firing at unseen snipers in Baghdad, handing out footballs to Iraqi children and rescuing an Iraqi family injured by an explosive device.

In two months, the Multi-National Force-Iraq channel has climbed to 16th in YouTube's most subscribed-to listing and has, the military says, just passed the 1 million video views mark.

With titles like Battle on Haifa Street and Iraqi Boy Scouts Prepare for Jamboree, the clips are intended to show a "boots on the ground" perspective of Iraq, a statement on the site says."

Department of defense to block troop access to Myspace, Youtube, MTV, Blackplanet , photobucket and more sites (OpEdNews.com, May 12, 2007)

"Starting May 14th, the Department of defense, citing security reasons, will block troop access to some of the most popular websites on the planet.

(snip)

The sites blocked include Myspace, Youtube, MTV, Blackplanet , photobucket, live365, hi5.com, pandora.com, 1.fm, and other sites.

The troops WILL be allowed to access the sites from home computers. But, since most troops on assignment in Iraq, Afghanistan, Korea, etc. are using DOD networks, they would not be allowed to use THEIR personal computers on DOD networks."

Comments

[selenite.livejournal.com]

Huge bureaucracies stop efforts by worker bees to bypass central control. This is not new. Given that Dubya's had kind words for milbloggers this looks like a turf-protection effort by the permanent Pentagon bureaucracy.

[tepintzin.livejournal.com]

I question Dubya's sincerity at any given time. He could easily have had kind words for milbloggers and ordered it all cut off in the same day. He's a politician, after all, and a particularly duplicitous one.

[patgund.livejournal.com]

The Register mentioned that the bandwidth hogs may not be the troops, but the brass.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/16/powerpoint_worse_bandwidth_hog_than_killbots/

"I worked for a number of years for the US Army...during their involvement in resolving the conflict in Bosnia. It may interest you to know that although we were responsible for a command and control system which was being used at the time to plan the movement of supplies and personnel between the various Army facilities in Hungary and Bosnia, that we were only allowed to download updates to our system (which was designed to be a real-time planning system) between 2am and 4am.
The reason for this was that the generals in Bosnia and Hungary had a video conference set up and running between themselves and personnel in the Pentagon during the remaining time period. Not that it was ever in use, mind you. It was on 22 hours a day, showing pictures of empty rooms on both sides of the video conference.
During the two months I actually spent in Bosnia, I believe that the video conference was only actually used for a total of about 3 hours. The rest of the time it was wasted bandwidth. Of course, the military thinks that YouTube et al are bandwidth hogs, and they're right. But the biggest wasters of bandwidth are not the troops, it's the brass.
Wired has some similar testimony:
"In Kosovo, the PowerPoint briefings got to be so big the whole [classified network] system regularly slowed down until it would take eight hours on occasion for an email to get through."

[selenesue.livejournal.com]

Well, duh. The Multi-National Force-Iraq channel is not intended for the guys who are there, it is soothing pablum for the folks back home. THEY don't want the real on-site military people to comment on it, Goodness Knows!

Princes di is wearing a new dress

[duckflambe.livejournal.com]

Makes sense, if we just yanked GI blogs and videos somebody might get upset. Now we can have the war we want, the one where we kick-ass and save puppies.

(Yes, I'm using "we" instead of "they", because its my country which makes me responsible for this war too.)