Federal Executives block YouTube and MySpace even while:

• Their communications teams work around the bans and use these sites to communicate with the nation.
  
• Their staff and web teams struggle to keep up with Internet trends.
  
• Their agencies face the biggest recruiting challenge in a generation.
  

It is humorous that the Secretary of Energy invites us to explore the Solar Decathlon MySpace page while he doesn't trust his own employees to do so. And you've got to chuckle a little as you watch the Secretary of the Interior on a field trip to learn about "technology and collaborative science" via the collaborative technology that his department banned. But I hope no one in the Coast Guard or FEMA (both in DHS) would benefit from NOAA's environmental visualization channel on YouTube, because they aren't allowed to watch it.

The federal workforce is interested and motivated in the latest technology trends; presentations on Web 2.0 technologies are consistently popular among feds. And feds want to stay relevant by gaining experience with these technologies, but they are hampered by misguided management decisions.

The Council for Excellence in Government recently found that these kind of restrictions, "the system of rules and regulations crafted on the assumption—unique to government—that people will do the wrong thing unless closely regulated," contribute to job dissatisfaction among federal employees. No one wants to work for a boss who assumes she is irresponsible.

Executives may be concerned about employee productivity or bandwidth usage at work, but as the founder of Wikipedia said: We ought to "wait until we see the bad behavior" before we "put everybody inside a cage." Doing otherwise "makes a bad society."