DOD's new policy 'likes' social media, but with caveats

For all its benefits and the enjoyment it brings to the people who use it, social media has a dark side. When it comes to military users, one slip — such as an inadvertent mention of a deployment timing or location — can endanger lives. But given its intrinsically open nature and constantly changing boundaries, how can the Defense Department effectively manage social media?

Pentagon officials at the highest levels recognize the importance of social media for communicating with the public and collaborating within the department, as well as providing troops access to their loved ones even when they are stationed thousands of miles away. But leaders know they must weigh those advantages against the sensitive security needs inherent to military operations.

To strike a balance, DOD officials are focusing on regulating, not restricting, social media use.

Currently, DOD’s social media policy is governed by a directive-type memorandum (DTM) from 2010 — a two-page document that superficially outlines the rules and responsibilities those under Pentagon jurisdiction must follow in their use of social media. That policy will change in the coming months as the department prepares to issue more permanent and detailed DOD instructions that will expand the existing guidance.

“Because the DTM was the first ever, it was galvanizing for the department to work its way through the potential rules around social media use at DOD,” said Rob Carey, DOD’s deputy CIO. “As you can imagine, with a very structured, hierarchical organization such as ours, we were dealing with ‘How do I use this thing?’”

The DTM was meant to be a quick set of guidelines governing activities in the social media space. It was set to expire July 15 but will remain in effect until the new policy comes out. Even now, two years after its release, the department is still determining just how to use the still-developing and sometimes unwieldy tool. With a rapidly evolving capability like social media, a hot new trend can catch fire and fizzle within a matter of weeks, so it’s difficult to issue hard-and-fast rules.

“The underlying effort of the DTM was to work toward breaking down some of the silos of keeping information together, allowing a broader perspective of options out there and seeing what we could gain,” said Jack Holt, who helped write the DTM while serving as senior strategist for emerging media at DOD; he is now director of policy analysis at Blue Ridge Information Systems. “It was partly about communicating with the American public and understanding what else we can do within the medium and how it can work behind the firewall as well.”

Where the DTM laid the groundwork by establishing definitions, responsibilities and the importance of information sharing, the new guidelines incorporate a more thorough and detailed look at social media, at least as it exists today, Carey told FCW in a preview of the new policy.

Two areas will receive particular emphasis: making sure the rules are clear and making sure security is adequately covered. Both areas will be clarified when DOD unveils the policy in the coming months, but according to Carey, the exact release date is still to be determined.

“It’s currently at the legal sufficiency review; the lawyers look at the final version one more time and determine what to address,” Carey said. “Right now there’s no date set. I can only say to stand by.”

Clearing the fog of Facebook

Social media has permeated the lives of most Americans, but for the military, it’s a relatively new capability, and rules for its use haven’t always been well understood.

One prominent misconception is that the use of dot-mil e-mail addresses on social media is forbidden. That simply isn’t true, Carey said. What matters is how a social media account associated with a dot-mil address is used. The key designation is whether or not someone is officially conducting job-related business.

“The secretary of the Navy, the commander of European Command, the defense secretary — they use social media [for an official] purpose,” Carey said. “The account that is set up is an official account, so dot-mil e-mail addresses are used to support official presences. If you’re using Facebook or any of the others for social purposes — and there’s nothing wrong with that, consistent with all the other [operations security] guidelines we have in place — you should use some other e-mail address.”

No social network sites are universally banned from military use, but there are certain circumstances in which the use of one or another might be temporarily suspended. For instance, after the tsunami struck Japan last year, access to YouTube was shut down on some military networks to free up the bandwidth needed to coordinate disaster response efforts.

The new policy will address those issues and some newer ones that have begun to crop up around the downloading of information, such as the growing and evolving use of advertising, endorsements, image alteration and gaming, Carey said.

The elephant in the room

Perhaps the biggest issue in the military’s use of social media is security. And one of the biggest problems with security is that the traditional, bureaucratic approach isn’t flexible enough to keep up with the rapidly changing social media landscape.

“The issue is not social media; it’s new software techniques that need various degrees of safeguards,” said Paul Strassmann, distinguished professor of information sciences at George Mason University’s Volgenau School of Engineering and former director of defense information at DOD. “It’s a new set of applications…and whether I’m in Kabul or Mogadishu or any other place, I need to be able to communicate. [Existing systems can be] too onerous, difficult, expensive and hard to execute. So what people do is work around using social media. Social media is a big bootlegging operation. It breaks down the structure.”