Air Force shuts down chat rooms

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March 31, 2005

By Bryant Jordan
Times staff writer

The Air Force has shut down some online chat rooms it hosted after several airmen in them used language with “racial and sexual overtones,” according to officials.

Officials have not given specifics on the violations or identified the airmen involved, though the alleged violators have been identified to their major command commanders.

Air Force spokeswoman Lt. Col. Dedra Witham said it will be up to the airmen’s majcoms to decide whether any disciplinary action is appropriate.

She said the focus for the Air Force is on why it did not have good oversight of the chat rooms in place. “The Air Force is addressing the whole issue of what’s allowed in the chat rooms,” she said.

Though no airmen with Air Force Space Command were connected to the incident, AFSC publicized it in order to get the message out that racist and sexist conversation is not allowed on the Air Force chat rooms, said a SpaceCom spokesman.

SpaceCom said the airmen abused the chat room’s “rules of engagement” by having electronic conversations involving racial and sexual overtones, as a result, the Air Force deleted the chat rooms in which the violations occurred and temporarily suspended the ability to create new ones.

Gen. Lance W. Lord, Air Force Space Command commander, said airmen “need need to understand that when they are using a government computer, every site they visit, every e-mail they send and every file they download are all monitored … It’s our responsibility to use these systems for their intended purposes.”