Thanks to the dozens of Air Force officers, enlisted men, and civilians who have written in to DANGER ROOM about which blogs are blocked – and which ones aren't – on their base networks.
The bottom line is that independent sites using the main blogging platforms, like Wordpess and Blogger, are pretty much shut out, universally. Other sites – like this one – seem to sneak through at some installations.
One way to get around the filters: use an RSS reader, like Google Reader or FeedDemon. "The only drawback," one Air Force type writes, "is that if images are from a URL that is blocked, they won't show. And if an entry contains a YouTube video, it often makes the browser freeze for a moment as it tries to process the video being blocked."
Anyway, there have been some choice comments and anecdotes, with all the feedback. I though I'd share some of it here:
The Air Force has gone crazy with its new blocking policies. Some examples I can no longer read online include: Washingtonpost.com
Politics and Opinions page blogs and some of the opinion columns. This is true at MANY online news sources where "opinion" or editorials are the subject.
Many local news sites are affected such as www.wowt.com/ (because they offer videos, which are almost as taboo as YouTube).
weatherunderground.com (some parts of it only. The neighborhood weather map is one)
Some sections of http://weather.unisys.com/
All of the personal weather station sites hosted on an ISP website (example: and www.mcsittel.com/weather/currwx.htm).
Working at the Air Force Weather Agency, it's vital to see neighborhood weather changes at some of these stations when tracking severe weather! Some storm-chasing pages such as: www.mesoscale.ws/ and www.extremeinstability.com/index.htm
The list goes on, but you get the idea...
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I am currently in the Air Force and work in a network control center... I've actually been called in at 11 PM to unblock conspiracy theory sites for my commander...
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On Air Force public affairs officer writes: No professional communicator can overlook or dismiss venues that speak clearly from the
American public and the blogsphere does exactly that. However, in order to read and research those, I must use a non-networked computer.
Our workaround is a few unfettered high speed connections to government-owned computers that do not exist on the AF network. With proper security and internet protection software we can harvest this viable feedback from the American public we’re charged to serve &
protect. This isn’t rocket science.
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We have work to do, and if we can't read blogs when we are at work, then maybe we will be more productive. A lot of people in the military hate proxy filtering, but is allowing every web site a good use of tax dollars, bandwidth and personnel? I can't even comprehend the logic behind one of your quotes that claims that if blogs are blocked at work, then they won't see them at home. Forgive my "John Stossel" indignation with that claim.
If you or your readers are really upset about it, suggest that they write their congressmen and plead for tax increases, more funding for the military, and an increase in the USAF's force strength to allow for time for blog reading at work.
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A lot of folks are having trouble with online video, as well as blogs. Take this officer: My Air Force organization has banned Quicktime on all machines, claiming that it's a security threat. We can use and view Windows
Media only. So by this move, we are blocked from even many official US
Government and Air Force websites that post Quicktime video!
