This software Time Doctor is better than blocking Twitter as it only monitors Twitter in work hours. Team members still can use Twitter when on lunch. Also some employees must use Twitter for their work so it's silly to just indiscriminately block it.

It's even funnier that we all spend time twittering about it afterwards.

I get the feeling most of us aren't actually doing that much.

Jonathan
http://www.ThreeMoneyMethods.com

1) White House does have a Twitter account that the Web team updates: @whitehouse

They also run a Facebook page and other social media accounts. You can find those accounts from Whitehouse.gov.

2) Many federal departments and agency's IT departments block many Websites and freeware, and yes, the younger, savvier, federal employees may not like it but they deal with it. This has been the case for years, and has nothing to do with which President is in power or left/right politics. It has to do with network security policy; the respective agency's CIO/IT department makes the call.

Like most posters: great job on banning twitter!

So this is not what I consider a violation of transparency in the White House. Its what I call common sense. Lots of people work in the White House. That is a ton of people to be accountable for. Despite how smart these staffers et al may be, we are all quite prone to doing things we later wished we had not done. The White House does not want to have to walk back dangerous, uncontrolled drivel from staffers and this is a logical consequence in that effort. I don't want people tweeting from the White House, just as I do not want someone with an IQ lower than my own as President of the United States.I simply cannot comprehend how anyone could find this problematic. I really don't.

Twitter is cool and useful, but the idea that everyone should always have access to it is nothing but "twitter-fanboi-talk".

How exactly is Twitter of ANY value to the White House? It is an UTTER waste of time and bandwidth. For those that will argue in Twitters favor, please compare its pathetic reach in comparison to international television, radio and the much maligned newspapers. Twitter is a pissant. A pathetic waste of time. An epic failure waiting to happen.

The great thing about Twitter and all of it's banal "content" is that it will simply disappear when everyone is done. There won;t be any mess to clean up. No environmental hazards, no recycling, just poof and all the banal bits are gone!

Additionally, could we please get a clue before any further comments about the inability of one government agency to use Firefox. Get educated on the issues of running a network or sizable IT department before making glib and asinine statements about how someone else runs theirs.

The Firefox software might not have a price tag. But, rolling out an application in a large IT environment cost real hard currency and lots of it. Just pushing out the latest Adobe Reader patch, free software, costs money in any organization. There are non-trivial expenses for planning, implementation and maintenance. And for those that argue that they should be allowed to install it themselves; unrestricted workstations, those that the user has administrative access, are the most expensive to maintain regardless of the software.

Anyone who has worked in a large scale organization has encountered these folk. And the greater the risk, the greater the risk avoidance. Furthermore, these people will have very detailed and very real evidence backing up their decisions. To imply this decision is under the rubric of their openness & transparency efforts (or implying that Obama's folks personally weighed in on the State Dept's Firefox banning), as some of the comments here have implied, is just silly.

Yes, the goal should be risk mitigation strategies over risk avoidance, but even if lots of pressure is applied, as was the case in the Blackberry thing, its still a tough road to hoe.

Certainly an enlightened bunch.

RT
www.real-anonymity.pro.tc

This is a "workplace" policy, not an administrative policy. It's not like any employee who has Twitter on their phone can't still tweet. Twitter, the great communication tool that it is, can be a huge, time-sucking vampire to people who don't know how to manage themselves. Like any good workplace, if you've got to limit access to certain websites to keep your employees out of trouble, that's better than wasting your time having to repeatedly address the behavior.

Let's walk through a scenario:

White house staffer tweets from whitehouse system.

Staffer receives lots of tweets. Clicks on short URL.

Twitter takes them to malware infested webpage.

Malware "rootkit" loaded on machine.

Rootkit hides from OS and AV tools.

Rootkit "piggybacks" on routine communication and downloads more malware.

Hacker uses "platform" to look for other systems to hack.

White House compromised.

Imagine being able to hack Obama's travel schedule and the risk that would pose to him?

That's has to be a key issue for the white house people. I know its fashionable to focus on the political dimension, but that's not the real issue. You are right that there is a desire to control information release, but its the information release that's invisible that the Secret Service is more concerned about, in my view.

Administrations change. The barnacles in civil service by and large do not. And my experience is that a combination of fear for their careers and resentment at change has kept things locked down.

Here was my conclusion from the conference:

"I fear the great mass of experience and knowledge that the presenters brought to these government intelligence officials has fallen on deaf ears. This, despite the manifest failures of intelligence leading up to 9/11. I believe few, if any, of the attendees will push for these new communications technologies to become a part of their toolset and they will almost certainly not propose their various departments risk workload budgets or career trajectories to implement social software to promote and defend democracy and to debate issues of U.S. actions and global democracy with the world."

I don't want to say nothing will change, but I can't help thinking that nothing has.

However, this is also true with many large corporations and is tied into the Security departments and site blockers like Barracuda that most large places own.

A lot of the best studies of "Gov 2.0" are done off computers with air cards and off the network since the Fb/Twitters of the world are often blocked.

Steve Ressler
GovLoop.com

When will we get to the point where Shirky's excess cycles going into collaborative filtering and such on the Internet are stolen back not from TV but from Twitter. I don't see a lot of Twitter use as that different from TV to be honest (two-way web conversation, yeah I get it), although the hornets nest of Twitterers (who waste half their days Twittering) will surely disagree.

In this case, security and risk is greater than any of Twitter's "synergy building" benefits.

If the staffers in the White House are anything like the hacks in the Coast Guard, they've found work-arounds. The die-hard tweeters in the Coast Guard certainly have, using alternative web-based tools to tweet and follow Twitter. And I'll not say any more for fear of letting the owl out of the bag...

I like to tell the anecdote of a senior person at work who emails me with Microsoft Outlook (which I can only check at work) a Microsoft Word email attachment of a newspaper article copied into it, to let me know about some breaking tech news. And I say, Yes, I heard about that on Twitter two days ago. He is how government works, not me.

also last time i checked not all the staff, ministries, IT folk and political machine are concentrated in the white house, so i'm sure someone on his staff will update his twitter and facebook and keep everyone informed, as for transparency, there is so much one in that position can do about that... if he goes around saying absolutely everything he does, it can be used against him or the USA.

1. Regarding the criticism of the administration not using Firefox: I'd imagine that the oversight of technologies in the State Department is kind of a big deal. If it's easier for them to manage just one browser in order to oversee its use in within the infrastructure of the State Department, I'm not sure that I see a problem with that...

2. It's probably safer for administration officials to use Twitter outside of the White House...

3. I see absolutely no hypocrisy in the fact that Obama has a Twitter account despite this "ban." Furthermore, the idea that this "ban" illustrates the lack of use of @BarackObama since the election is probably misleading; I'd think that it probably hasn't been used as much because it was a tool for winning the election, and since he won, he has so many other channels to be seen (inside AND outside of social media).

On some fronts, I agree that the ban is ludicrous, but just wanted to make note of these ideas.

I don't need to pay for someone in the White House to waste time on twitter. They hopefully have more important things to do.

I don't like this administration. Never have. Never will. Neither do a lot of other Americans. Including people that voted for Obama.

Michelle Rafter

Use it for good and not evil!