Army unit monitoring bloggers
Defensetech writes about an Army ‘Big Brother’ unit that is monitoring bloggers and other open source news sources for operational security violations:
Since the relatively wide-open days following the Iraq invasion in 2003, the Pentagon has been slowly tightening the screws on military bloggers. Officers started busting frontline diarists for their websites. In Iraq, new rules required bloggers to check with their commanders before posting. Then, in August, a message came highest levels of the military that “EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY, NO INFORMATION MAY BE PLACED ON WEBSITES THAT ARE READILY ACCESSIBLE TO THE PUBLIC UNLESS IT HAS BEEN REVIEWED FOR SECURITY CONCERNS AND APPROVED IN ACCORDANCE WITH DEPUTY SECRETARY OF DEFENSE MEMORANDUM WEB SITE POLICIES AND PROCEDURES, DECEMBER 7, 1998.”
The regulations have already led several milbloggers to shut down their blogs – depriving many of us of our ability to read what’s truly happening – and missing some of the best writing on the blogosphere as a result…
Eternal quest of leaders to shut the voice that defy, doesn’t matter its in democracy or whatever form of government. Just the method or style changed, but ultimately same target, stop the voice. Regardless of country or Ism everywhere same case.
It’s not only the Army! I work at a Marine base in the library, which serves as the only online access for many of our Marines locally. Two weeks ago, Headquarters blocked access to MySpace from all our library computers.
Since many Marines use MySpace to keep in touch with family and freinds, this stirred up a controversy, as you can imagine. A couple of our guys got up a petition to protest this action, and as of last Wednesday, access to MySpace was restored.
So there may be hope for milbloggers!