DoD official slams ban on personal Web use

WASHINGTON, March 6 (UPI) -- A senior Pentagon official has poured cold water on the idea of banning non-official traffic from Defense Department computer networks as a security measure.

"This idea that 'we'll just limit what our employees do' is very simplistic," David Wennergren, the Pentagon's deputy chief information officer, said during a panel discussion at the Information Processing Interagency Conference in Orlando, Fla., this week.

"We have to think differently if we're going to get over the hump," Wennergren added, according to a report by GovernmentExecutive.com.

Earlier this year Defense Information Systems Agency chief Lt. Gen. Charles Croom suggested that a ban on personal use of military networks might be one way to solve looming security problems. But this week Wennergren said that was a self-defeating tactic.

"The easy security answer is 'nothing goes out and nothing comes in.' But (by) definition, this is a self-afflicted denial-of-service attack," he said.

He also suggested that many officials were not on the right wavelength to be able to come up with Internet-age solutions.

"If you think Second Life is a game, you may be missing the point," he said.