Government Must Embrace Social Networking, Not Ban It
President 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.
Rome wasn't built in a day. Keep in mind, the majority of people in upper echelon government are still dinosaurs. Give it time and I'm hopeful none will be disappointed.
Sounds to me like one half of the Government and its satellite agencies is trying to drag the other half into the 21st century. Until they are all working together, we'll continue to have face-palm episodes like the ones cited in the article… :)
Taking a purely sanitized approach to security in US government means blocking anything that is perceived as a risk – like Facebook [for example]. FB have already been known to spread exploits through their site. However, is the need to block web access due to browser-based exploits overblown? Surely, its a cat and mouse game with hacker vs. patcher – but 99.999999 of the time a good network security program will mitigate any lame attempt at compromising systems through browser-based exploit. Of course, if your industry calls for it, then that 0.000001% vulnerability becomes an unacceptable risk you simply can't take.
In my industry (the newspaper) blocking FB would be killing a 'source' for at least three of our departments – editorial, marketing and advertising. We just can't block FB. Nor can we block MySpace, nor can we block web-based email. It’s all about balance.
Completely agreed about the risk and mitigation of browser based exploits. However, generally speaking, the blocking of Facebook, YouTube and MySpace has nothing to do with security and everything to do with the perceived use of bandwidth or wasting valuable work time.
In my mind, it would be more sensible to have a policy which addresses both bandwidth utilization and wasting valuable work time on social networking sites. But unfortunately, as we both know all too well, the government does not operate that way.
True enough. However, removing said dinosaurs from their positions is nigh impossible. Or, it takes years of waiting for these people to move in to new jobs or retire.
So certainly, within due time things will change. Unfortunately for America, we need dramatic change swiftly, which is just not going to happen.