The Pentagon has begun restricting U.S. military personnel’s access to networking sites such as MySpace and YouTube, and imposing stricter rules on military bloggers. Military bloggers include troops stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as civilians working in the Pentagon and family members of those serving in the military.
“These are the most authentic, most honest voices out there,” says Noah Shachtman, who writes Danger Room, a national-security blog for Wired. “They’re some of the best sources you’ll find on how progress on the ground is really developing.”
Voices like Matt Burgen, a former paratrooper in Chicago who publishes stories of his peers on www.blackfive.net. He recently stated that:
“It’s awfully hard for me to sit there and say you have to come down on these bloggers, when they themselves, especially the senior staff at the Pentagon, are leaking more information than every other source combined.”
“When I get into a discussion with a public affairs or even an operational security officer about blogging, I will usually point to the D.O.D. [Department of Defense] website or Army.mil and show them pictures that clearly violate operational security, in their definition.”
The letter of the new law says there should be no posting, no emails, no letters, no written communication without checking with the Commanding Officer first. This is obviously impossible to enforce, but serves as a warning to “watch what you say.”
This is part of what’s being called an information war in Iraq. Some are scared to death of what a soldier’s voice might reveal about the war. Information leaks to terrorists is a big concern, but no secrets have ever been found on a military blog. The concern is closer to the thought that Al Qaeda may piece together a big picture of American strategies.
We can trust a soldier with a gun, but not with the digital equivalency of a microphone.
Spc. Jean-Paul Borda, founder of military blog aggregator Milblogging.com, wrote that the latest policy announcement is unlikely to silence troops posting online: “…the fact that I’m blogging right now, pretty much speaks for itself.”
Read the full NPR story here.
Update (via Wired.com):
The Defense Department isn’t trying to “muzzle” troops by banning YouTube and MySpace on their networks, a top military information technology officer tells DANGER ROOM. Rear Admiral Elizabeth Hight, Deputy Commander of Joint Task Force-Global Network Operations, says that the decision to block access to social networking, video-sharing, and other “recreational” sites is purely at attempt to “preserve military bandwidth for operational missions.”Not that the 11 blocked sites are clogging networks all that much today, she adds. But YouTube, MySpace, and the like “could present a potential problem,” at some point in the future. So the military wanted to “get ahead of the problem before it became a problem.”
