Using Facebook to stay connected to your friends and family while stationed in the middle of nowhere in Afghanistan? Whatever changes are underway for the Pentagon’s use of social media, they’re not going to stop you from updating your Wall.
“Social media tools are pervasive in the 21st century communications environment, and the department intends to fully utilize those capabilities,” Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, assures Danger Room.
As Danger Room reported yesterday, the Pentagon’s gotten rid of its social-media office, saying that using Twitter, YouTube and Facebook has to be part of everyone’s regular communications habits. (Some have more success than others.) And the 2009-era policy that enshrined military access to social media — the result of a hard-fought internal struggle — expires on March 1.
That’s caused confusion on the interwebs. A former contractor with the Pentagon’s chief information officer, Noel Dickover, worried on his blog that the expiry risks “ceding the internet space to our adversaries.”
But Whitman says that by March 1, what’ll be gone is the bureaucratic format for the policy (.pdf), to be replaced by a more permanent one — not the substance. (To be technical, a temporary Directive-Type Memorandum will give way to a department-wide Issuance.) Under the guidance of Deputy Secretary William Lynn and the review of the Pentagon’s cyber-policy arm — which now includes former social-media chief Sumit Agarwal — the policy will still give military members access to social media.
Some bureaucratic shifts may occur, but in terms of substance, “we’re not anticipating any changes,” Whitman says, as social-media use is “the way a predominantly young force communicates.”
The proof will be in the post-March policy. But if so, that’s a big victory for those who argued that the Pentagon would lose out if it didn’t aggressively use social media to define what it does and what it stands for. As recently as mid-2009, the military was considering an almost-total shutdown of social networking tools for its members, out of the fear that they’d compromise internal network security.
Last year, though, the Pentagon leadership scrapped that idea. The compromise reached was that the military’s unclassified network, NIPRNet, would allow access to “Internet-based capabilities across all [Defense Department] components,” while the department’s chief information officer, undersecretary for intelligence and head of Strategic Command would monitor social-media usage for potential vulnerabilities. Call up as many goofy viral videos as you want, but no gambling sites, hate-speech forums or porn.
That’s encouraged the growth of social networking inside the military, filtering up all the way to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, who makes policy-significant pronouncements over Twitter. (“Gains in Afg are tenuous; now is the time to press home our adv-to redouble our efforts. Mil presence will diminish-partnership will endure,” @thejointstaff tweeted on Wednesday.)
We’re still awaiting what formal or bureaucratic changes will be made to the military’s social-media guidelines, especially after WikiLeaks has reopened the question of how much access troops should have to internal networks. So far, the answer has been to strictly punish those who’d remove information from department computers, with courts-martial threatened for burning CDs or inserting thumb drives. But if there are security risks to social-media use, Whitman says, “we have to work on the way to mitigate that, but we’re not going to mitigate them by telling people not to use social media.”
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