Peter has posted on his Another Unofficial Blog a story that is surly to get some play in the coming weeks throughout the land of military blogs. The original story is found on Wired’s Danger Room as told by Noah Shachtman; the big story? The U.S. Army has ordered its in-house network admin staff to cease the blocking of popular social media sites such as those used by our very own Commandant. In the For Official Use Only (FOUO) document made available to Wired it’s noted that the sites that are to be made available (presumably no later than 22 May) are those of Facebook, Delicious, Flickr, Twitter, and Vimeo.

As some of you already know we on the Coast Guard network can already get to, and without any work-around, sites such as Delicious and Flickr. But the popular social site of Facebook and the micro-blogging system of Twitter have been cut off from the inside… for the most part. It’s interesting though that the Army will be allowing the in-house use of Viemo, a site used to self-publish your own video clips. Thinking about it though, what better way to see what your soldiers are seeing than to allow them to watch it.

Now comes the big question; will other services follow suite? As the pieces notes this directive is not aimed at other DoD entities which further excludes us as part of DHS. I for one can’t see the reason to further limit our access to these and other social media sites on the basis of “security” as has been done in the past. Though there is the problem of actually not doing work due to social media overload- but that almost never happens… ;)

The next step for you and I is to keep our ears to the ground and listen to what’s coming next for the CG. If there are any network security/policy types out there who would like to comment on this please leave one below or get in touch, I’d love to hear/read a response to this.

It should be noted that not all of our favorite sites will be taken off the Army’s blocked list, and therefore our currently non-existent list is bound to follow the larger services recommendation. Sites such as YouTube, Pandora, MySpace (anyone still use that), StupidVideos, etc. will still be off limits. But hey, who would complain if we could get onto Facebook or Twitter to see what the Coast Guard is doing? ‘Cause y’all know that’s the only thing we’d use it for right?