So much for the anti-blogging order being misunderstood: Now the Pentagon is cutting access to YouTube, MySpace and other sites entirely:
Lt. Daniel Zimmerman, an infantry platoon leader in Iraq, puts a blog on the Internet every now and then “to basically keep my friends and family up to date” back home.
It just got tougher to do that for Zimmerman and a lot of other U.S. soldiers. No more using the military’s computer system to socialize and trade videos on MySpace, YouTube and more than a dozen others Web sites, the Pentagon says.
Citing security concerns and technological limits, the Pentagon has cut off access to those sites for personnel using the Defense Department’s computer network. The change limits use of the popular outlets for service members on the front lines, who regularly post videos and journals.
Memos about the change went out in February, and it took effect last week. It does not affect the Internet cafes that soldiers in Iraq use that are not connected to the Defense Department’s network. The cafe sites are run by a private vendor, FUBI (For US By Iraqis).
Also, the Pentagon said that many of the military computers on the front lines in Iraq that are on the department’s network had previously blocked the YouTube and MySpace sites.
The ban also does not affect other sites, such as Yahoo, and does not prevent soldiers from sending messages and photos to their families by e-mail.
Among the sites covered by the ban are the video-sharing sites YouTube, Metacafe, IFilm, StupidVideos and FileCabi; social networking sites MySpace, BlackPlanet and Hi5; music sites Pandora, MTV, 1.fm and live365, and the photo-sharing site Photobucket.
 I just got back from the Riverside Marriott, where the Inland Southern chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists just gave out the 2006 Southern California Excellence in Journalism Awards.
The Hesperia Star won three awards, with Peter bringing home the biggest kill: In an all-circulation category (meaning he was up against the Press-Enterprise, the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin and all the rest), he came in first for Best Editorial/Opinion Piece. The piece — “Censorship is wrong answer” — was never posted onto our old Web site, so on Monday, I’ll dig it out of the archives and post it on the Web for all to see.
I won two second place awards:
The Daily Press also cleaned up, with a ton of awards for photographer Michael Stenerson. Reporter Tatiana Prophet pulled in the most reporting awards for the High Desert, by my guesstimate. El Mojave and the Desert Dispatch also won awards.
More details can be found in the Daily Press story and on the Star site this week.
Update #1: Peter’s editorial can be found here.
Update #2: Sadly, only one of the three award-winning pieces got commentary passed along by the SPJ judges.
So, for the second year in a row, I talked to Ranchero Middle School and Hesperia Junior High School kids about the value of going to college, this year wearing my Virginia Tech t-shirt.
Last year, I had a tough act to follow last year — a doctor who spent a lot of time, as I recall it, talking about the income potential in the job. Those sorts of questions posed to journalists don’t go quite as well.
This year, though, I was thinking I had it made, since the program was packed full of school district employees, and I figured the kids would be interested in someone not involved in schools.
Well, so much for that. I followed school nurse Peggy Lindsay and it was like following Nickelodeon’s Kid’s Choice Awards. There were discussions of snot, there was talk of blood. There was endless amounts of vomit. There were live insects inside a kid’s ears. Needless to say, she was a huge hit.
I have got to work on my material for next year.
At long last, the full archives of all the stories moved over onto HesperiaStar.com (more than 500 older stories from the original site, including everything about the casino, everything relating to the last election, everything about Hesperians affected by 9/11 or serving in Iraq or Afghanistan, and much more) will be accessible sometime after next Tuesday. It’ll take Google and all the other search engines a few days to go through all the archive links, but once that happens, all the old stuff should be available through any search engine you care to use.
Over the last few years, I’ve done several online interviews with soldiers serving in Iraq, including getting digital photos taken by them. It’s much more immediate, obviously, than waiting until they return and it’s something I wish I could do more of.
It’s probably over, though, according to a piece in Wired:
The U.S. Army has ordered soldiers to stop posting to blogs or sending personal e-mail messages, without first clearing the content with a superior officer, Wired News has learned. The directive, issued April 19, is the sharpest restriction on troops’ online activities since the start of the Iraq war. And it could mean the end of military blogs, observers say.
Military officials have been wrestling for years with how to handle troops who publish blogs. Officers have weighed the need for wartime discretion against the opportunities for the public to personally connect with some of the most effective advocates for the operations in Afghanistan and Iraq — the troops themselves. The secret-keepers have generally won the argument, and the once-permissive atmosphere has slowly grown more tightly regulated. Soldier-bloggers have dropped offline as a result.
The new rules (.pdf) obtained by Wired News require a commander be consulted before every blog update.
“This is the final nail in the coffin for combat blogging,” said retired paratrooper Matthew Burden, editor of The Blog of War anthology. “No more military bloggers writing about their experiences in the combat zone. This is the best PR the military has — it’s most honest voice out of the war zone. And it’s being silenced.”
Army Regulation 530–1: Operations Security (OPSEC) (.pdf) restricts more than just blogs, however. Previous editions of the rules asked Army personnel to “consult with their immediate supervisor” before posting a document “that might contain sensitive and/or critical information in a public forum.” The new version, in contrast, requires “an OPSEC review prior to publishing” anything — from “web log (blog) postings” to comments on internet message boards, from resumes to letters home.
Failure to do so, the document adds, could result in a court-martial, or “administrative, disciplinary, contractual, or criminal action.”
I’ve worked the PR side of the street, and I know of the frustrations of having someone go off-message, particularly when there’s the potential for leaking sensitive information. (Not to mention simply embarassing the leadership.)
Still, this is a real pity. Hopefully this will be revised or rolled-back.
Update: Not surprisingly, the folks over at the Columbia Journalism Review aren’t happy about this, either.
On the Media spoke to milbloggers, including Blackfive himself.
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