To cut back on US taxpayer generated payroll being sunk into Defense Department employee time-wasting surfing sites like MySpace and YouTube, the Pentagon has banned (.pdf) 13 sites from being reached from its network, all but citing such ‘recreational traffic’ as a National security threat : “[Recreational Internet usage] impacts our official DoD network and bandwidth ability, while posing a significant operational security challenge.”
Banned sites include:
- YouTube
- MySpace
- Metacafe
- IFilm
- StupidVideos
- FileCabi
- BlackPlanet
- Hi5
- Pandora
- MTV
- 1.fm
- live365
- Photobucket
As alternatives, Pentagon employees can still waste their time surfing:
- Dailymotion
- BuzzHumor
- Flickr
- VH1… etc.
Add to that Craigslist has been blocked for several years, at least on some Air Force bases. At times, there have even been in blocks for anything with the word “mail” anywhere in the URL.
I doubt that this is due to bandwidth and network costs. These are tiny compared to the cost in lost productivity, which I believe is the true reason they are doing this.
The security risks with allowing these sites is also very small, compared to the rest of the Internet.