Redstate

By streiff Posted in Republicans — Comments (12) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

I've long believed that one of the compelling attributes of right-leaning sites was their inclination to think and inquire before running screaming into the streets. While we deride the left for their crackpot overarching conspiracy theories (this one, for instance, places RedState's Mike Krempasky on the fringe of a vast conspiracy, Mike is not on the fringe of anything) and undying love affair with post hoc ergo propter hoc a couple of incidents in as many weeks has led me to question if we are descending that same slope.

Read on.

The incidents in question all arise within the US Department of Defense.

A couple of weeks a blogstorm materialized over the Army's issuance of a new, or rather updated, Operations Security regulation, AR 530-1.

Wired's Noah Schachtman, a good journalist, misreported the story asserting that the regulation required prior approval of email from soldiers and prior approval of blog entries. Without even bothering to read the regulation many blogs hopped on the left's tried and true censorship bandwagon. The claims wilted but damage was done.

This week the cause celebre was another censorship nothingburger. Department of Defense blocked access to eleven popular internet sites citing their drain on the bandwidth available for military operations: MySpace, YouTube, Photobucket, Metacafe, MTV, iFilm, Hi5, Pandora, Live365, BlackPlanet, 1.FM, StupidVideos, Filecabi.

I noted on the RedState post on the subject that I believed the directive was misinterpreted and, in all fairness to my compatriots here others agreed and provided more detail.

Today's Washington Post reports:

Senior officers said they enacted the worldwide ban out of concern that the rapidly increasing use of these sites threatened to overwhelm the military's private Internet network and risk the disclosure of combat-sensitive material.

"The idea behind it is to have the bandwidth available to mission-critical areas," said Navy Lt. Denver Applehans, a spokesman for U.S. Strategic Command, which oversees the task force that designed the restrictions.

In a memorandum to troops dated Friday, Gen. B.B. Bell, commander of U.S. forces in South Korea, said the task force had noted "a significant increase in the use of DoD network resources tied up by individuals visiting certain recreational Internet sites," he said. Bell added that the traffic poses "a significant operational security challenge."

[...]

Under the policy, troops will still be allowed to access the sites from non-military computers. But few soldiers in combat areas carry private computers. They will continue to have access to the sites through Internet cafes that are not on the military computer network, officers said.

The issue, in its final analysis, was pretty simple. Troops were viewing sites from military computers over a military network. The gross effect of some tens of thousands of people viewing video, listening to audio, or accessing photo galleries is huge and when one considers the demands imposed upon the network by streaming video from drones and a host of other surveillance, command and control, and intelligence systems it is easy to understand why DoD decided that first dibs on bandwidth went to warfighters.

That this issue was taken up at all is baffling. Rear Admiral Mark Fox spoke on the subject of telecom access of troops in Iraq only two Saturdays ago at the Milbloggers conference. He said that troops on at the Forward Operating Bases can subscribe to private internet and private cellphone service and that many of the troops do avail themselves of these services. The DoD ban does not apply to those private networks.

I just ask my friends and colleagues to take a deep breath ratchet down outrage and the slow the rush to judgment to at least a fast walk to judgment. In the end it is our credibility that is on the line.