The US Defense Department has blocked access to websites like YouTube, MySpace, Hi5, Photobucket, MTV, Pandora for soldiers who are serving in countries like Iraq or Afghanistan.


Unlike nations like China, Iran or UAE where sites are banned due to cultural or political reasons, Pentagon is citing insufficient bandwidth and declining productivity as primary reasons behind this latest blanked ban on music and photo sharing websites.

Soldiers can still access blocked sites on their personal computers that do not use the military network for connecting to the Internet.

Some argue that this ban is imposed to prevent soldiers from uploading video clips on YouTube or watching videos / pictures posted by Iraqi militants. But will this prevent them from uploading videos to YouTube via email ?

According to Time, the sites covered by the ban are YouTube, Metacafe, IFilm, StupidVideos, PhotoBucket, MySpace, Hi5, Pandora, MTV, 1.fm, and live365.

Unless Pentagon imposes a ban on email, soldiers can easily share pictures and videos with the external world even if they cannot watch or download what others have uploaded on the internet.