Army targets milbloggers, email


New policy means few military bloggers

Now this is a as big a political mess as you are likely to see.

The U.S. Army has ordered soldiers to stop posting to blogs or sending personal e-mail messages, without first clearing the content with a superior officer, Wired News has learned. The directive, issued April 19, is the sharpest restriction on troops' online activities since the start of the Iraq war. And it could mean the end of military blogs, observers say.

Military officials have been wrestling for years with how to handle troops who publish blogs. Officers have weighed the need for wartime discretion against the opportunities for the public to personally connect with some of the most effective advocates for the operations in Afghanistan and Iraq -- the troops themselves. The secret-keepers have generally won the argument, and the once-permissive atmosphere has slowly grown more tightly regulated. Soldier-bloggers have dropped offline as a result.

I've been trying to do some digging on this, that means something other than looking up stuff on the internet.

Officially it is about operational control and security. Unofficially it sounds a lot like reaction to milblogger criticism of Senator Harry Reid. Add the military tendency to declare everything classified, and it looks like a winner.

The military blogger reaction has been pointed.

I can understand not sharing some information, but the guidelines seem to go too far. Considering that the Congressional Democrat leadership would like nothing more than to paint Iraq as "another Vietnam," I have to wonder if the Army has forgotten just what helps feed their domestic support.

More to the point, I have to wonder what this says about a society that is supposedly interested in free speech and freedom of the press.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Thu - May 3, 2007 at 04:00 PM  Tag


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