Thursday, February 28, 2008

No blogs for you ...

[A big Brain welcome to DBK's readers.]

At least not if you're in the Air Force:

The Air Force is tightening restrictions on which blogs its troops can read, cutting off access to just about any independent site with the word "blog" in its web address. It's the latest move in a larger struggle within the military over the value -- and hazards -- of the sites. At least one senior Air Force official calls the squeeze so "utterly stupid, it makes me want to scream."

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That would be us, a blog run by former service members, one (me) ex-Air Force. Too bad the young guys can't read stuff from people who've been there and done that.

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"A couple of years back, I fought this issue concerning the Counterterrorism Blog," one Air Force officer tells Danger Room. "An AF [Air Force] professional education course website recommended it as a great source for daily worldwide CT [counterterrorism] news. However it had been banned, because it called itself a blog. And as we all know, all blogs are bad!"

...

Within the Air Force, there's also a strong contingent that wants to see open access to the sites -- and is mortified by the AFNOC's restrictions. "When I hear stuff this utterly stupid, it makes me want to scream.... Piles of torn out hair are accumulating around my desk as we speak," one senior Air Force official writes in an e-mail. "I'm certain that by blocking blogs for official use, our airmen will never, ever be able to read them on their own home computers, so we have indeed saved them from a contaminating influence. Sorry, didn't mean to drip sarcasm on your rug."

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Believe me, I'm not discounting operational security but this is ridiculous. This is in the same vein as the recording industry trying to marginalize the interwebs. It's stupid and the equivalent of trying to demolish a brick wall by banging your head against it. Instead of embracing the technology and learning how to work within it, they think the answer is to block it out. What they don't get is the Internet has become an entrenched part of everyone's daily lives, our instant link to the world and folks are comfortable using it. It's become a habit. Shit, they always told us the Air Force were the smart ones. Lotta stupid running around there now.

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