When dealing with any sort of hostile advarsary, whether in the military realm or in the world of business, seldom is all of the information presented, and seldom is it all completely correct. That's why the concept of Military Intelligence is so misunderstood by the average layman.

Average Joe Q. Public expects that facts are facts and that they can always be discovered and easily interpreted correctly, like what they see on TV in a CSI episode. Nearly never does that happen in real life (take buying a used car, for instance), and especially seldom where opposing military interests are involved. A large part of military strategy involves hefty doses of misdirection, misinformation, feints, and frantic efforts to observe what the enemy is doing, and subsequently determining how much of what is observed of the ememy's activities are misdirection, misinformation and feints. To complicate matters, that compiled information is seldom more that 10% of what's actually going on in the enemy camp, if it's accurate at all. There is a lot of voodoo in figuring out what's really going on in the enemy's mind, and how best to defeat them.

That being said, you might more readily understand why the military might not want to draw a lot of attention to social web sites as being the huge security risk that they are. Especially when dealing with an enemy that contains large numbers of non-techonologially-savvy personnel, but has a huge number of fanatical followers that can be exploited for labor, and a lots of money for bribes and pay-offs to people who are technologically trained. By their nature, social websites are completely "open", meaning nonsecured, so just about anyone can assume any identity and interact with anyone else, hence all the uproar about disguised sexual predators possibly frequenting the sites.

So, take "Sue Smith" from "Souix City, Iowa", the "girl" that lonely PFC Jones has been making time with while logged on to his favorite social web site. "She" could actually be Abul Muhommad from Kobul, an intelligence operative for the Taliban, and has been milking poor PFC Jones for all the stray intelligence he can while promising him to marry him when he returns to the States. Now, perhaps not all of the cells of the Taliban and AlQuida and other terrorist-like gangs have any clue as to how best to exploit the Internet to further their goals, but I guarantee you that an official public announcement stating that social websites are a huge security concern would definitely cause that enemy to take intense interest.

Was the Pentagon announcement a lie? Of course not, because bandwidth usage is a completely legitimate problem. But like a good game of three-card-monty, the Pentagon may be making their advarsary look in the direction they want them to look, which is away from the conspicuously unstated potential security vulnerability.