14 DAY TRIAL // The Israeli army plans to ban social networking and webmail on its network, after multiple soldiers shared sensitive or embarrassing data via Facebook and other websites in the past.
Gadi Abadi, the head of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) intelligence corps information security department, explained for the Israeli Channel 2 that the army aims to prevent the leak of classified information on social media websites.
Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, will be banned from work computers within offices and bases, but will remain accessible from break rooms or mobile phones.
"We give IDF soldiers a lot of credit. They are good soldiers who care deeply about security, but they are human. When a soldier is in his office at the unit, the risk of confusion and mistakes is higher.
"When you separate the work environment from the non-operations environment, the number of mistakes drops significantly," Abdi said, according to Haaretz.
The ban comes after in recent months the IDF faced international embarrassment over images and videos uploaded by soldiers on Facebook and elsewhere.
In one instance, an Israeli soldier is shown dancing offensively around a Palestinian woman that is blindfolded and held against a wall.
Back in 2008, the IDF battalion commander was even forced to cancel a mission because a soldier leaked critical details about it on his Facebook profile.
Since 2006, the Israeli military has a special unit tasked with scanning social media websites for signs of possible security breaches.
According to a memo about information transfer protocols, army classified data has been found on an Internet forum operated by Hamas.
The data included images of IDF weapons, senior officials, military exercises, which were obtained from the social networking accounts of Israeli soldiers.
But the IDF are not the only armed forces to prohibit social media. In August 2009, the U.S. Marines announced a similar ban Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and any Web service that "allows communities of people to share common interests."