Report at 0600, use no more than 140 characters: Uncle Sam wants you for his Twitbook account. After recent military restrictions (both considered and enacted) on servicemembers’ use of social media, the Pentagon has finally drafted a formal social media policy, reports Wired’s Danger Room. Read the official Pentagon document here (PDF). Of course, this development comes at a time when more and more government agencies, officials, and even politicians have begun using services like Facebook and Twitter for public relations. So, military access seems like a natural Web 2.0 evolution. But “access,” as defined by this new the policy, remains potentially tenuous, as you would expect. As Danger Room notes:

The new policy allows servicemembers to use the Defense Department’s unclassified networks to access everything from “SNS” (that’s “social networking services” in Pentagon-speak) and “image and video hosting websites” to “personal, corporate or subject-specific blogs” (that’s us!) and “Wikis.” But it also gives commanders wide latitude to restrict access to preserve operational security. A Pentagon news release notes that the new policy allows commanders to “safeguard missions” by “temporarily limiting access to the Internet to preserve operations security or to address bandwidth constraints.”

Still, for the connections social media can furnish between servicemembers and their families overseas—not to mention that the best policy is always an actual, clearly articulated policy—accommodating the information impulses of those in uniform seems like a great idea.

Source: Danger Room

Image by ob1left, licensed under Creative Commons.

According to Live Science, the military may soon utilize a battlefield video system like the National Football League’s instant replay technology. The system would work by tagging individual frames of video with metadata like time, date, and location in order to help analysts get a quick sense of the relevance of each recording. Other pieces of data might include audio input from soldiers on the ground identifying people and structures captured on video. Why do this? Well:

In the past few years, the amount of intelligence and surveillance video coming in from robots and other sources has increased sharply, overwhelming analysts who simply can't keep up.

For instance, U.S. Air Force drones collected roughly 1,800 hours of video a month in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2009, nearly three times as much video than in 2007, noted Howard Lance, chairman, president and CEO of Melbourne-Fla.-based Harris Corporation, which provides the NFL and Major League Baseball instant-replay technology.

This is only expected to grow as the number of robots increases on the battlefield, as do their capabilities - for example, the General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) can record in 10 directions simultaneously.

Now Harris is helping the Pentagon with this information overload by helping devise a customized video analysis system that might cut the time needed to analyze trillions of bytes of video from weeks to minutes. After all, U.S. broadcasters handle 70,000 hours daily of video, Lance noted.

Source: Live Science

(Thanks, Danger Room.)

Image by cell105, licensed under Creative Commons.