Pentagon Ponders Social Networks
Balancing national security with military personnel's use of social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace is one of the Pentagon's biggest technology challenges, Army Chief Information Officer Jeffrey Sorenson told reporters at a high-tech conference Thursday. Appearing at the Gov 2.0 summit, he characterized the issue as "a point of friction" within the Defense Department -- and a problem that Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and Deputy CIO Dave Wennergren is trying to fix.
Wennergren is working on a policy paper to inform agency leadership on how and whether those Web sites, which let those deployed overseas stay in touch with family and friends, should be accessed on the Pentagon's unclassified computer network. His review comes on the heels of an August ban on Facebook and MySpace by the Marines. "It gets down to management of polarities," Sorensen said, noting the open question is how the military can balance operational capabilities and security.
Social networking sites aside, troops on the ground are leading the Pentagon's efforts to embrace super-secure collaborative technologies that give them a tactical edge while enterprise-level offices are trailing behind, Sorenson said. For its part, the Army has "grown up with a very specific ways of conducting operations" but is increasingly aware that publishing pamphlets makes no sense in the digital age where guidance and training documents can be updated and disseminated in real-time, he said.
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