US .mil blocking in Japan

Wed Mar 16 19:50:08 UTC 2011

On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 2:48 PM, Jeff Aitken <jaitken at aitken.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 09:14:13AM -0700, andrew.wallace wrote:
>> This isn't the rhetoric of a super power, more like one of a university
>> campus. [...] It strikes me straight away as amateurish to be blocking
>> web sites in able to have enough bandwidth for operational purposes.
>
> On the contrary, it's entirely plausible that US forces assisting with the
> recovery are (1) using more communications resources than normal, and (2)
> relying on infrastructure that's operating in a degraded state due to
> fiber or power issues.  If so, it's entirely reasonable to put limits on
> bandwidth-hungry but non-essential applications as a precautionary measure.
>
> Here's an excerpt from http://www.nextgov.com/nextgov/ng_20110314_9111.php?oref=topnews:
>
>    Military units operating in Japan face bandwidth shortages and
>    network limitations that inhibit communications and command and
>    control, Defense sources told Nextgov. Misawa Air Base, located on the
>    northeast tip of Honshu, warned its personnel on a blog post Friday
>    that the Defense Switched Network, which handles voice calls, was in
>    backup mode and had only limited capacity, a fact confirmed by a
>    Pentagon source Monday.
>
>    The blog post added, "We have a number of connectivity issues.
>    Internet has been up and down due to our connections through other
>    places in Japan. For example, Yokota [Air Base] and several other
>    locations are having issues because we all have power and connectivity
>    issues right now."
>
>    The Pentagon also took the extraordinary step of blocking access to a
>    range of commercial websites to ensure that its networks have enough
>    bandwidth to support mission-essential communications, Nextgov
>    learned. This move, a military source told Nextgov, possibly indicates
>    one or more undersea cables used by military networks were damaged by
>    the earthquake.
>
>
> --Jeff
>
>
>

Here's the problem with the logic of blocking all of the most popular
sites; they tried this from time to time in Afghanistan on the
NIPRnet. Whenever someone was unable to get to YouTube, Facebook, etc.
they, still bored and/or wasting time, simply went to some other web
site which also wasted equally as much bandwidth.

-- 
Jeffrey Lyon, Leadership Team
jeffrey.lyon at blacklotus.net | http://www.blacklotus.net
Black Lotus Communications - AS32421
First and Leading in DDoS Protection Solutions