The Department of Defense concerned a message on Friday that sets a new policy permitting access to social-networking services from the DOD network.

"Service members and DOD employees are welcome and confident to use new media to communicate with family and friends -- at home stations or organized but it's important to do it safely," the Department said in blog post about the message.

DOD IT workers are authorized to for the time being limit Internet access to address bandwidth restrictions or protect operations security, the new policy says. As well, administrators will continue to stop access to banned content like pornography and gambling sites, and work to make sure that the use of social networking does not begin malicious code to the network.
The new policy reveals the importance of social networking, the DOD said. "This policy recognizes that Internet based capabilities are essential to operations across the Department of Defense," the new policy says.

In 2007, the DoG began blocking sites including YouTube and MySpace from military networks. But that was not an official policy, it said in the blog post.
"This is DoD's first official policy on new media. past to today, the Services and other DOD components developed and execute their own ad hoc policies -- a few banning it all together," it said.

Last year, for example, the Marines banned the use of social-networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter from its network. With the new policy, the Marines will have to repeal that ban. "Under this new policy, there will be open and steady access across the board," according to the DoD blog post.

Some agencies, though, have been using sites like Twitter in an official ability to communicate with the public. Actually, the main Web site for the DOD contains links to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube pages.