facebookPresident Barack Obama was the first candidate to make extensive use of social networking tools during his campaign for the presidency. His campaign used these tools so the average user benefitted from visiting Obama’s various web sites and social networking profiles. With Obama at the helm of the United States, one would expect the President to force a bureaucratic culture change, ushering in a new era of governmental use of social networking and embracing the web. Unfortunately, the government has both embraced and banned social networking in the same breath.

But it is tough. “We have a Facebook page,” said one official of the Department of Homeland Security. “But we don’t allow people to look at Facebook in the office. So we have to go home to use it. I find this bizarre.”

The huge, monolithic bureaucracy known as United States government makes so many decisions on a daily basis, you have to wonder if there is any cross communication among agencies. Unfortunately for the American people, the various cabinet level departments rarely make decisions after consulting each other – decisions are ultimately self-serving.

In an all too common scenario within the United States government, personnel assigned in Public Affairs positions who work for the Department of Defense have been tasked with updating their profiles on various social networking sites, to include YouTube, Facebook and MySpace. Normally this would not be a problem, except for the fact that DoD has explicitly blocked all access to YouTube and MySpace, with Facebook lately seeing similar treatment by many DoD agencies. This scenario is not limited to DoD – it is quickly becoming the modus operandi.

DoD even went so far as to create a YouTube clone, ironically dubbed TroopTube, with the intent of allowing the soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines an avenue for sharing videos amongst themselves. In what some folks may consider a peculiar twist of fate, TroopTube has been blocked by a huge number of Air Force bases for reasons unknown.

How does the government expect its personnel to update YouTube, Facebook and MySpace if these sites are being blocked? Simple – spend more money on Internet connectivity.

Speaking specifically from the DoD perspective, agencies already have to pay for access to what is known as the NIPRNET – Non-Secure Internet Protocol Router Network – the DoD unclassified network which is connected to the Internet proper. The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) maintains the Internet Access Points (IAP) connecting to the Internet. It is on these connections where certain sites like YouTube and MySpace are blocked, with Facebook next on the potential chopping block.

So if these social networking sites are blocked at the DoD IAPs, then how do personnel update their agencies’ social networking profiles? These agencies procure additional connectivity to the Internet which is not routed through the DoD IAPs – a “backdoor” if you will – with the sole intent of using the connection for doing nothing but social networking. We spend money to both block and enable social networking in the same breath.

Though nowhere close in magnitude, like the AIG bailout, this is a complete and utter waste of taxpayer money. In this day and age our government must embrace social networking not ban it – both because social networking has proven to be as important and vital as email as well as to end the wasteful spending of money on pointless Internet connections in the name of social networking.

The United States government, and the various agencies within the bureaucracy, obviously finds value in using these various social networking tools. Otherwise they would not have personnel assigned to work in this area. Why allow certain people to work on these sites but then turn around and ban the entire workforce from viewing the very product their own co-workers created?

The Obama administration was supposed to usher in a new era for government whereby social networking and various internet-based tools were embraced. Although nothing revolutionary has transformed our government yet, we are still less than one hundred days in to the Obama presidency so there is still time to work the magic our government sorely needs.