Marines ban social networking sites

The federal government may be embracing social networking, but the Marines certainly aren't. The service has banned Twitter, MySpace, Facebook and other social networking sites from its networks for a year, effective immediately. Other branches of the military are considering taking the same action.

"These Internet sites in general are a proven haven for malicious actors and content and are particularly high risk due to information exposure, user generated content and targeting by adversaries," said a Marine press release issued Monday. "The very nature of SNS [social network sites] creates a larger attack and exploitation window, exposes unnecessary information to adversaries and provides an easy conduit for information leakage."

There are plenty of other opinions at the Pentagon, however. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has 4,000 Twitter followers. The Department of Defense is getting ready to unveil a new home page, complete with social networking tools. Even the Army recently ordered all U.S. military bases to provide access to Facebook.

Are the Marines fighting a battle they are not going to win? Quite possibly. It will be interesting to see just how this issue plays out.

For more on the Marines and social networking:
- check out this InformationWeek article