Air Force Blocks Access to Many Blogs | Danger Room from Wired.com
I’m rather annoyed by the military treating its own soldiers like children, as in this case, when the Air Force decreed that its officers cannot visit sites with “blog” in the URL. They’re also missing out on an incredibly valuable PR tool by not letting soldiers pen blogs for the public.
I hear the same argument about Wikipedia and about the Internet in general, about how it’s unreliable and you can’t trust it, blah blah blah. We ought to give our students, our soldiers, our citizens the measure of respect they deserve and assume they’ll dig deeper and find the facts, and not just trust anything they find on the Internet. But besides that, blogs and the Internet are a valuable tool for terrorists, but they’re just as valuable for the good guys as well. Using modern technology, soldiers can share important and interesting data and highlight things that are a little strange, a little out of place… the kind of data that can help uncover terrorist plots before they happen.
Obviously, nobody ever gave military top brass too many points for adapting to modern times; just look at Iraq, where we had a perfect plan for fighting a different war. But we can’t keep our soldiers handicapped in the information age while the terrorists are adapting easily and swiftly. Besides that, it just makes me angry to see the military treating our soldiers like babies.
