Soldiers Can't Blog Without Approval

ARTICLE HERE

"Wired.com has obtained a copy of updated US Army rules (pdf) that force soldiers to stop posting to blogs or sending personal e-mail messages without first clearing the content with a superior officer. 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. Under the strictest reading of the rule, a soldier must check with his or her superior officer before every blog entry posted and every email sent, though the method of enforcing these regulations is subject to choices made by the unit commanders. According to Wired, 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, though many of the people affected by these new regulations can't even access them because they are being kept on the military's restricted Army Knowledge Online intranet. Wired also interviewed Major Ray Ceralde, author of the new regulations, about why this change has been made."

(read more at the link above)

Frank was pretty insistent that incoming e-mail wouldn't be filtered. I am sort of thinking that it is all being watched, both outgoing and incoming. Joining the military means you lose freedom of speech now, brilliant.

Were they as regulated as this before though? I had heard of isolated cases where someone would read something posted by a soldier and then report back to some superior to have that soldier's chops busted, but I didn't think that that was very wide spread. Either way, it still sucks ass and is irony in it's purest form: DEFEND FREEDOM FOR OTHERS, BUT YOU YOURSELF HAVE NONE!

Devin, I was in the Canadian military for 11 years, and we never had regulations like these governing what we were allowed to say or when we were allowed to say it. The only rules when I was in revolved around using your military email accounts to send personal e-mails and whatnot (same as any civilian business), but they had no problems with us using the web or posting on MB's, etc. Thanks for assuming though, that really made my day!

Sorry, I should have been more specific. My beef with the regulation is that ALL communication gets monitored and has to pass through the hands of an approval process, and not just from front-line soldiers:

"Under the strictest reading of the rule, a soldier must check with his or her superior officer before every blog entry posted and every email sent, though the method of enforcing these regulations is subject to choices made by the unit commanders. According to Wired, 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, though many of the people affected by these new regulations can't even access them because they are being kept on the military's restricted Army Knowledge Online intranet."

So my wife would have to forward e-mails to me through my C.O.? That's just wrong IMHO. I understand the need to keep data classified. It's no different that obeying IP rules in normal civilain business. And I get that many freedoms are denied to you when you join. Freedom of speech, especially that of your family, should NOT have to be one of the ones you have to give up on outside of Top Secret stuff, you know?

The thing with this new regulation though is that it seems like one designed to limit political damage more than one to limit the revelation of top secret information, you know what I mean? The US Military doesn't have the benefits of the protection of whistleblower legislation, so any time you hear anything awful about something that the military has done, more often than not it would be through blogs/emails written by soldiers. Under this new regulation, what are the chances of the rest of us hearing anything bad? It effectively cuts off all critical information coming out of Iraq for you guys, given how deplorable your press is now.

Eh, it's ok. I rate so little in Devin's world I'm sure that he never knew about me serving. I think I mentioned it a few years ago in some thread or another, but you certainly wouldn't know it from some of the recent political threads I've posted in, that's for sure.

And I should have been way more clear about why I posted this one in the first place. It disturbs me that they seem to be doing this more out of PR/damage control than any genuine security reasons. Poxy posting about the YouTube thing only brings that home even more. "Don't look behind the curtain!"

Some of the best blog reading out there has been done by soldiers. The writers aren't exlpicit in terms of operations the soldeirs are on or anything that can remotely be considered secret (and their superiors, at least in the ones I have read, are aware it's going on), but they are a harrowing glimpse into how life in Iraq is day-to-day for these guys. And I think it's important to have that voice, and not just the constant "they hate our freedom let's torture their asses like Jack Bauer would" rah-rah you get out of most of the mainstream media.

You get so little real news out of Iraq in traditional channels that this type of thing is very necessary IMHO. Sure it's blogging and you have to take everything that gets said with a grain of salt, but I am sad that some of these blogs are going away now. Because you can't fake the emotion behind some of the things these guys write about, political motivations aside. And now we won't even get that glimpse into what it's like there.