URL:
http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/05/army_bloggers?currentPage=all
Army Squeezes Soldier Blogs, Maybe to Death
Noah Shachtman Email 05.02.07 | 2:00 AM
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.
The new rules (.pdf) obtained by Wired News require a commander be
consulted before every blog update.
"This is the final nail in the coffin for combat blogging," said retired
paratrooper Matthew Burden, editor of The Blog of War anthology. "No
more military bloggers writing about their experiences in the combat
zone. This is the best PR the military has -- it's most honest voice out
of the war zone. And it's being silenced."
Army Regulation 530--1: Operations Security (OPSEC) (.pdf) restricts
more than just blogs, however. Previous editions of the rules asked Army
personnel to "consult with their immediate supervisor" before posting a
document "that might contain sensitive and/or critical information in a
public forum." The new version, in contrast, requires "an OPSEC review
prior to publishing" anything -- from "web log (blog) postings" to
comments on internet message boards, from resumes to letters home.
Failure to do so, the document adds, could result in a court-martial, or
"administrative, disciplinary, contractual, or criminal action."
Despite the absolutist language, the guidelines' author, Major Ray
Ceralde, said there is some leeway in enforcement of the rules. "It is
not practical to check all communication, especially private
communication," he noted in an e-mail. "Some units may require that
soldiers register their blog with the unit for identification purposes
with occasional spot checks after an initial review. Other units may
require a review before every posting."
But with the regulations drawn so tightly, "many commanders will feel
like they have no choice but to forbid their soldiers from blogging --
or even using e-mail," said Jeff Nuding, who won the bronze star for his
service in Iraq. "If I'm a commander, and think that any slip-up gets me
screwed, I'm making it easy: No blogs," added Nuding, writer of the
"pro-victory" Dadmanly site. "I think this means the end of my blogging."
Active-duty troops aren't the only ones affected by the new guidelines.
Civilians working for the military, Army contractors -- even soldiers'
families -- are all subject to the directive as well.
But, while the regulations may apply to a broad swath of people, not
everybody affected can actually read them. In a Kafka-esque turn, the
guidelines are kept on the military's restricted Army Knowledge Online
intranet. Many Army contractors -- and many family members -- don't have
access to the site. Even those able to get in are finding their access
is blocked to that particular file.
"Even though it is supposedly rewritten to include rules for contractors
(i.e., me) I am not allowed to download it," e-mails Perry Jeffries, an
Iraq war veteran now working as a contractor to the Armed Services Blood
Program.
The U.S. military -- all militaries -- have long been concerned about
their personnel inadvertently letting sensitive information out. Troops'
mail was read and censored throughout World War II; back home,
government posters warned citizens "careless talk kills."
Military blogs, or milblogs, as they're known in service-member circles,
only make the potential for mischief worse. On a website, anyone,
including foreign intelligence agents, can stop by and look for information.
"All that stuff we used to get around a bar and say to each other --
well, now because we're publishing it in open forums, now it's intel,"
said milblogger and retired Army officer John Donovan.
Passing on classified data -- real secrets -- is already a serious
military crime. The new regulations (and their author) take an unusually
expansive view of what kind of unclassified information a foe might find
useful. In an article published by the official Army News Service, Maj.
Ceralde "described how the Pentagon parking lot had more parked cars
than usual on the evening of Jan. 16, 1991, and how pizza parlors
noticed a significant increase of pizza to the Pentagon.... These
observations are indicators, unclassified information available to all …
that Operation Desert Storm (was about to) beg(i)n."
Steven Aftergood, head of the Federation of American Scientists' Project
on Government Secrecy, called Ceralde's example "outrageous."
"It's true that from an OPSEC (operational security) perspective, almost
anything -- pizza orders, office lights lit at odd hours, full or empty
parking lots -- can potentially tip off an observer that something
unusual is afoot," he added. "But real OPSEC is highly discriminating.
It does not mean cutting off the flow of information across the board.
If on one day in 1991 an unusual number of pizza orders coincided with
the start of Desert Storm, it doesn't mean that information about pizza
orders should now be restricted. That's not OPSEC, that's just stupidity."
During the early days of the Iraq war, milblogs flew under the radar of
the Defense Department's information security establishment. But after
soldiers like Specialist Colby Buzzell began offering detailed
descriptions of firefights that were scantily covered in the press,
blogs began to be viewed by some in the military as a threat -- an
almost endless chorus of unregulated voices that could say just about
anything.
Buzzell, for one, was banned from patrols and confined to base after
such an incident. Military officials asked other bloggers to make
changes to their sites. One soldier took down pictures of how well armor
stood up to improvised bombs; a military spouse erased personal
information from her site -- including "dates of deployment, photos of
the family, the date their next child is expected, the date of the baby
shower and where the family lives," said Army spokesman Gordon Van Fleet.
But such cases have been rare, Major Elizabeth Robbins noted in a paper
(.pdf) for the Army's Combined Arms Center.
"The potential for an OPSEC violation has thus far outstripped the
reality experienced by commanders in the field," she wrote.
And in some military circles, bloggers have gained forceful advocates.
The Office of the Secretary of Defense, for example, now regularly
arranges exclusive phone conferences between bloggers and senior
commanders in Afghanistan and Iraq. Major Robbins, for one, has argued
strongly for easing the restrictions on the soldier-journalists.
"The reputation of the Army is maintained on many fronts, and no one
fights harder on its behalf than our young soldiers. We must allow them
access to the fight," Robbins wrote. "To silence the most credible
voices -- those at the spear's edge -- and to disallow them this
function is to handicap ourselves on a vital, very real battlefield."
Nevertheless, commanders have become increasingly worried about the
potential for leaks. In April 2005, military leaders in Iraq told
milbloggers to "register" (.pdf) their sites with superior officers. In
September, the Army made the first revision of its OPSEC regulations
since the mid-'90s, ordering GIs to talk to their commanders before
posting potentially-problematic information. Soldiers began to drop
their websites, in response.
More bloggers followed suit, when an alert came down from highest levels
of the Pentagon that "effective immediately, no information may be
placed on websites … unless it has been reviewed for security concerns,"
and the Army announced it was activating a team, the Army Web Risk
Assessment Cell, to scan blogs for information breaches. An official
Army dispatch told milbloggers, "Big Brother is not watching you, but 10
members of a Virginia National Guard unit might be." That unit continues
to look for security violations, new regulations in hand.
See the Wired blog Danger Room for additional information on the Army's
blogger ban.
--
David Solomonoff, President
Internet Society of New York
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
isoc-ny.org
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