Miltary Blocks Access to Email Sites

Citing cocerns that security could be comprimised, the United States Navy and the Marine Corps has blocked access to e-mail services, such as Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL and GMail from government computers.



There's a fine line here. I can understand the military's need to protect information, but for most that are overseas, this is their only link to their families back home. If someone on one of the commercial services is reading their emails (which I doubt), then the military is most likely reading emails that are sent out from official government email addresses, so from any angle you look at it there's a privacy issue.

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[edit on 28-10-2005 by asala]

I think this is perfectly understandable on the part of the military. Each person is given their own .mil address and that should be used.

Good decision.

It doesn't matter if they use the military email address or an on-line one, it all goes through the military network so everything would be monitored anyway. It does address possible security issues. For instance when they send an email using one of the online services it records the IP number in the header, but if they use the official one then they have the chance to remove that information.

See Nerdling's notes... This is to eliminate the chance of not being able to track down the leak. Personally, I'm amazed that this hasn't always been in place... I just assumed it was....

Another reason that this blocking was done was due to the number of viruses and trojans that have wrecked havoc on the internal military's network.
When I was supporting the DOD a while back, blocking http email sites was one of the solutions that the IT administrators were planning on implementing.
I for one am glad that they have finally done this. It caused me many a sleepless night when their networks were compromised by someone opening such things as an email attachments for Nimda and ILOVEYou worms.