DENVER - Soldiers serving overseas will lose some of their online links to friends and loved ones back home under a Department of Defense policy that a high-ranking Army official said would take effect Monday. The Defense Department will begin blocking access "worldwide" to YouTube, MySpace and 11 other popular Web sites on its computers and networks, according to a memo sent Friday by Gen. B.B. Bell, the U.S. Forces Korea commander. The policy is being implemented to protect information and reduce drag on the department's networks, according to Bell. "This recreational traffic impacts our official DoD network and bandwidth ability, while posing a significant operational security challenge," the memo said. The armed services have long barred members of the military from sharing information that could jeopardize their missions or safety, whether electronically or by other means. The new policy is different because it creates a blanket ban on several sites used by military personnel to exchange messages, pictures, video and audio with family and friends. Members of the military can still access the sites on their own computers and networks, but Defense Department computers and networks are the only ones available to many soldiers and sailors in Iraq and Afghanistan. Iraqi insurgents or their supporters have been posting videos on YouTube at least since last fall, and the Army recently began posting videos on YouTube showing soldiers defeating insurgents and befriending Iraqis. But the new rules mean many military personnel won't be able to watch those videos — at least not on military computers. If the restrictions are intended to prevent soldiers from giving or receiving bad news, they could also prevent them from providing positive reports from the field, said Noah Shachtman, who runs a national security blog for Wired Magazine. "This is as much an information war as it is bombs and bullets," he said. "And they are muzzling their best voices." 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. Several companies have instituted similar bans, saying recreational sites drain productivity.
An American soldier's graphic account of his deployment in Iraq, detailing the firefights and frustrations of frontline life, has won a prize for books based on blogs, organisers said Monday.
Colby Buzzell's "My War: Killing Time In Iraq", the winner of this year's Lulu Blooker Prize, grew out of an online journal which he started in 2004 while serving as a machine-gunner based in Mosul, northern Iraq. The blog ran for just eight weeks before being shut down by the US military, but by then it had been widely picked up by the media and publishers offered Buzzell a book deal when he left the army in 2005. His uncompromising style, peppered with profanities and misspellings and inspired by authors such as Hunter S. Thompson and Kurt Vonnegut, gives readers glimpses of military life that rarely emerge from official sources. One entry, entitled "Men In Black", related a street battle as US soldiers were hunting down those responsible for firing mortars at their base. Buzzell, 31, described being ambushed by a man "dressed in all black, with a terrorist beard" shooting an AK47 machine gun at him. "I heard and felt the bullets whizz literally inches from my head, hitting all around my hatch and making a ping, ping, ping sound," he wrote. Just afterwards, "all hell came down around us" as "everywhere started unloading on us," he added. "I kind of lost it and was yelling and screaming all sorts of things, mostly cuss words. I fired and fired and fired and fired at everything," he wrote. After the battle, Buzzell confided his fears of having inadvertently shot innocent people to a senior, who told him to "put all the things that bother you and keep you awake at night and clog your head up into a shoebox, put the lid on it and deal with it later." "I pretty much started blogging just out of boredom," Buzzell told AFP. "I was bored in between missions but over time I realised it was therapeutic, it helped me to live out a lot of feelings." He added that the US military was getting tougher with bloggers as levels of discontent with the Iraq war were increasing. "A lot of soldiers over there don't want to be there, they want to get home, so if you have soldiers saying it's not going well, they will get a sense of that and I think the military is kind of scared," he said. His book, which has been translated into seven languages, beat 109 other entries from 15 countries to win the 10,000 dollar (7,383 euro) prize. Other frontrunners included "My Secret: A PostSecret Book" by Frank Warren, which features a collection of postcards on which people confess their most closely-guarded thoughts. http://www.breitbart.com/article.php...show_article=1
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