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The U.S. Marine Corps has banned Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and other social media sites from its networks, effective immediately.

“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,” reads a Marine Corps order, 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 that puts OPSEC [operational security], COMSEC [communications security], [and] personnel… at an elevated risk of compromise.”

The Marines’ ban will last a year.

Social networking tools must be a core part of national defense, harnessing the power of communities of interest to collaborate and share knowledge to address a range of issues from analyzing intelligence data to post-war recovery initiatives, according to panelists speaking this week at the Open Government and Innovations Conference in Washington.

Social media software is being used by activists, businesses, governments and even criminals and terrorists worldwide and, as a result, cannot be ignored, panelists acknowledged.

Totalitarian regimes that do not want to give their citizens the right to petition government see the value of social networking tools as propaganda tools, said Lewis Shepherd, a former senior technology officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency and currently chief technology officer with Microsoft's Advanced Technology in Government.

Shepherd cited the recent elections in Iran in which the Iranian government used Web filtering software to block its citizens from access to Facebook. Later, the regime realized the potential of spreading anti-western propaganda through Facebook pages, which it set up through front groups, he said.

“You can’t win the [game] if you’re not in it,” Shepherd said, citing the need for U.S. defense and government agencies to embrace social media.

In an earlier era, “loose lips sink ships” was the military’s warning not to let even small details about military movements and operations slip in casual conversation. In contrast, social media Web sites today thrive on loose lips, making it even tougher to maintain operational security.

The problem is not so much people twittering away secrets as letting slip many smaller pieces of information that an adversary can piece together.

“There’s a tendency to think that if information is not classified, it’s OK to share,” said Jack Kiesler, chief of cyber counter intelligence at the Defense Intelligence Agency, in a presentation last month in Orlando, Fla., at the DODIIS Worldwide Conference for intelligence information systems professionals.

Sir John Sawers is due to take over as chief of the Secret Intelligence
Service in November, putting him in charge of all of Britain’s spying
operations abroad.

But entries by his wife Shelley on the social networking site have exposed
potentially compromising details about where they live and work, their
friends’ identities and where they spend their holidays. On the day her
husband was appointed she congratulated him on the site using his codename
“C”.

Lady Sawers had put virtually no privacy protection on her account, making it
visible to any of the site’s 200m users around the world who choose to be in
the open-access London social network on Facebook.

You can also follow the Army on Twitter. Or post a comment on its new blog. They're all part of the Army's new mission: social networking.

"If Ashton Kutcher can do it, the U.S. Army can do it," said Lindy Kyzer, who posts the Army's "status updates" on Facebook and "tweets" on Twitter.

You can also follow the Army on Twitter. Or post a comment on its new blog. They're all part of the Army's new mission: social networking.

"If Ashton Kutcher can do it, the U.S. Army can do it," said Lindy Kyzer, who posts the Army's "status updates" on Facebook and "tweets" on Twitter.

The Army announced the other day that it would get a million or more followers on micro-messaging site Twitter, just like “Punk’d” host and social networking superstar Ashton Kutcher. But catching to Mr. Demi won’t be easy — since many Army bases block Twitter on its networks.

It’s the latest example of the military’s schizophrenic relationship with social media.

BioInformatics LLC conducted a survey in November 2007 that found some interesting trends:



• 77% of life scientists participate in some type of social media
• 50% see blogs, discussion groups, online communities, and social networking as beneficial to sharing ideas with colleagues
• 85% see social media affecting their decision-making
• Discussion groups and message boards are still the most-used types of sites, but online communities are gaining fast
• User-generated content is not completely trusted for product information, but it is more trusted than information in printed trade magazines, editorial web sites, or online portals

Elsevier’s survey went a little further than the earlier survey, asking respondents to name sites. This generated a Top 11 list of social media sites in the sciences:





1. Nature Network (36%)
2. BioMed Experts (35%)
3. Facebook (35%)
4. MySpace (34%)
5. LinkedIn (33%)
6. ResearcherID (19%)
7. CiteULike (18%)
8. 2collab (18%)
9. del.icio.us (15%)
10. Connotea (14%)
11. Digg (14%)

The Defense Department made headlines earlier this year when it blocked access to the sites from military computers. In May, YouTube officials said they were pushing the Pentagon to reconsider. But this month, Army officials said they have no plans to back down and may block even more sites.