Well, it certainly looks official enough, from the Memorandum for Record from the Deputy Secretary of Defense, dated 25 February, 2010. The Directive-Type Memorandum (DTM) is titled Responsible and Effective Use of Internet-based Capabilities. The DTM can be found here. To smmarize the message, effective immediately, all of the unclassified networks (also known as NIPRNET) shall be configured to all access to these "internet-based capabilities." Now, before everyone starts to jump for joy, there are some caveats in the DTM. First and foremost, military commands have the ability and responsibility to protect and defend the network from attack and malicious code, along with restricting or preventing access to these sites if the bandwidth becomes constrained or to preserve military operations. Also, sites will be denied that provide access to prohibited content; such as, gambling, hate-speech, pornography, etc.There is an attachment to the message that spells out the types of social networking services (SNS) applies to. It applies to:
SNS
Image and video web hosting services
Wikis
Personal, corporate or subject-specific blogs
Data mashups (aggregation sites)
This is certainly good news for me. I hope that this ban will now allow me and the rest of my classmates at the University of Alabama's Interactive Technology Masters Degree program and who are in the US Military be able to access the wiki, social bookmarking sites (delicious), email, video sites, that we need to for our course work. I hope that the word reaches everyone. So please help me spread the good news. The DoD finally understands the importance of web 2.0 and social media. I wonder what's next? Ya'll have a good day. Roll Tide!
Thanks to Ben Parr for posting the story on Mashable
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