Soldiers Can't Blog Without Approval 358
denebian devil writes "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."
Absolutely Necessary (Score:5, Informative)
Today we are going to be traveling along road X and going to destination Y around noon. Boy, it is going to be hot. While there, we are going to be picking up an informant. He would be in big trouble if he is found out.
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This is an area where stopping the casual, incidental leaks is important. 10 innocuous blog posts from 10 different soldiers may individually give you zero useful information, but if you add them up, you have l
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From: Ted Striker
Subject: Re: Let's get seafood
Elaine Dickinson wrote:I can't tell you that. It's classified.
Love, Ted.
Re:Absolutely Necessary (Score:4, Interesting)
To Whom it May Concern:
Today we are going to be traveling along road X and going to destination Y around noon. Boy, it is going to be hot. While there, we are going to be picking up an informant. He would be in big trouble if he is found out.
No, that's not the reason for this.
The reason for this is that the Administration is painting a picture of poor abused soldiers being robbed blind by the evil, evil Democrats who want to steal their money and make them stay there without any armor or weapons or food. And these poor, poor soldiers love Iraq and the mission sooooo much that they just never, ever wanna go home. Ever!
Of course, the reality is that these soldiers and national guardsmen are pretty much sick and tired of being there, know just as well as anyone else that the whole affair is a lost cause, and frankly want to go home. NOW. Or rather, months and months ago when their tours SHOULD have been up, but were not due to shady probably-illegal-definately-immoral "stop loss" tricks to keep them there.
You can't have a misinformation or propaganda campaign starring soldiers if you let the soldiers actually talk. See: Tillman, Pat (and coworkers) or Lynch, Jessica. No, you have to silence them all, save a select few you can bully or bribe into towing administration line.
Simply put, this is a measure to shut the soldiers and their families up and keep their true feelings from coming to light, so the Administration can continue to lie about them. Nothing more.
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Army Knowledge Online info is wrong (Score:2, Informative)
I would expect better fact checking, but then I remembered this slashdot.
Haveing many of the people affected by these new.. (Score:2)
This is needed (Score:3, Insightful)
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This won't last long (Score:5, Informative)
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NO CARRIER
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unpossible!!!
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Damn straight! (Score:5, Insightful)
Soldiers are much like prisoners, they have some freedoms, but at the end of the day you're on someone else's time and in a place and they make all the rules, both good and bad. If you sign up (or get sent there) you play by the rules ment to keep everyone safe.
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Seeing that it would make more hostilities towards the soldiers.
And not to nitpick, but Iraqis aren't Arabs. Unless of course you are talking about foreign fighters.
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They aren't Saudi Arabs.
Re:Damn straight! (Score:4, Informative)
It was actually as much about casualty reporting as it was about OpSec. Families were hearing that their loved one had been killed in a blog before the military could tell them.
In other cases a wife would find out her husband had been killed when a neighbor came by with their condolences.
Its also about the rumor mill on more "mundane" things: Soldier Bob tells his wife that his Sergeant is having an affair with another female soldier. The Soldier Bobs wife tells the Sergeants wife. The rumor may not be true, but a marriage is going to have a hard time surviving that when they are thousands of miles appart for 12 to 24 months.
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Sgt. Joe sends his weekly email home to his family. The email includes a link to a National Geographic picture of the Bay of Yemen, and his email says "This is where Daddy is going to be next week."
A week later, the USS Cole gets bombed.*
This impacts (and endangers) not only Sgt. Joe, but everyone else on board that vessel, potentially even everyone deployed to the Bay of Yemen.
The danger here isn't so much that soldiers are going to intentionally give away
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Just to prove that schoolgirls online aren't always FBI agents, in this case she's Abdul El Abullah bin Abdul, a dedicated member of Al-Qaeda.
Censorship is normal ... (Score:5, Informative)
The original poster acts as though this is some new super-secret nefarious plot to keep secrets from the American public. The simple truth is that there has always been censorship of personal correspondence from war zones. This was true of WW2, Korea and, for all I know, of the Civil and Revolutionary Wars. Nobody likes it, least of all the poor junior officers who have to censor letter after letter, but it's a basic military necessity.
It's the military, not the cub scouts. Get over it.
Re:Censorship is normal ... UCMJ (Score:3, Informative)
But, hey, if it gives people the excuse to start spouting their holier-than-thou dogma about censorship, let's just let the
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A lot of Slashdotters apparently don't know or conveniently forget that there's this little thing called the Uniform Code of Military Justice that effectively says, "You are no longer granted all of the freedoms that are granted to non-military personnel under the U.S. Constitution." The ability to say whatever you want is one of those lost freedoms once you sign on the dotted line.
I'd say that is rather orthogonal to the issue at hand.
But, hey, if it gives people the excuse to start spouting their holier-than-thou dogma about censorship, let's just let them do it and get that frustration out of their systems, 'kay?
Can we agree that creating military rules and using them to discourage military personal from providing unclassified information to other Americans and to discourage them from espousing political opinions that are are disliked by the incumbent political party is unethical, detrimental to the US, and thoroughly opposed to the American ideal of free speech?
This regulation is obviously unenforcable in general. The military does not have the manpower
Did you even RTFA? (Score:5, Insightful)
No! You cannot apply the freedoms to the military that you do to the general public. Period. They're in a different league all together. The fact that you can't see that is very disconcerting.
And - damn it! - get rid of the damned Slashdot template of trying to turn this into a political issue by bringing "incumbent party" into it! I read TFA and there is NOTHING in there about politics, so stop trying to inject your own! This is absolutely nothing new and is not uncommon during a time of war.
From TFA:
If fact, if you had bothered to read TFA, which you obviously did not, the one blogger that they specifcally mentioned is a "pro-victory" blogger, hardly someone who goes against the current administration. Having read a bit of his blog, it is clear to me that he supports the idea of victory in Iraq, which IS the view of the political party that is in the White House! So, if anything this article demonstrates how this action goes against the views that are supported by the incumbent, political party! So, your little quip attempting to place blame on discouraging "them from espousing political opinions that are are disliked by the incumbent political party" is just an attempt for you to throw politics into this.
Keep your baseless attempts to make everything political out of Slashdot and move them over to Digg where they belong.
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Yes, and what makes this newsworthy is, this has nothing in particular to do with war zones or war-zone operations, or personal correspondence per se. This has to do with overall OPSEC, as the document states (you should read it), as regards any public, written communication by anyone in the Army, at any time, or by civilians who work for the DOD, or by people who work for companies that do business with the Army. Anywhere. At
SSDD (Score:5, Insightful)
Military censorship of all troops' correspondence is not exactly new.
No big surprise (Score:3, Insightful)
Freedom (Score:5, Insightful)
-Peter
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Right, but they can be removed forcibly. That force can be allowable within the framework of the Constitution as long as there is due process of law.
Can you not see how, for example, laws against treason and freedom of speech are in tension?
Anyone with access to this sort of privileged information must accept corresponding restriction on his freedom of speech. (Or accept the consequences.)
Makes sense, doesn't it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Loose lips and all that.
Of course this will be used to keep them from telling any news of events that don't run so lovely to keep the spirit on the "home front" up. I doubt, though, that this is the main concern. Those news get out, this way or another, because some of those soldiers will and do come home, and there ain't much that could keep them from talking.
Lots of info can be extracted from the blogs (Score:2, Interesting)
One of the story I remembered is as follows:
Mr. Smith was sent to battle, and he sent a letter once a week to Mrs. Smith to tell her that he's safe. Mrs. Smith's friend would always asked for the stamps on the letter because she was a stamp collector. I
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"Shoptalk may be sabotalk
"Beware... the walks have ears"
Another good page: Poster Talk [usmm.net]
British War Art [happydeathinc.com] is another site.
tool for selective enforcement (Score:5, Interesting)
In other words, if we like you, say anything you want. If you don't, we're going to dig through every single thing you do when your hands touch a keyboard and find something to hang you with.
This is going to sound like standard old-soldeir grumbling, but
Now it seems like things are going more toward a Soviet model. Absolute obedience, top-down flow of information, shut up and do what you're told every single time; running the entire military like basic training. Well, guess what? Saddam Hussein's vaunted "fourth largest army in the world" was trained and equipped on Soviet lines, and we went through it like a hot knife through butter. Analysis after the end of the Cold War strongly suggests that if the balloon had ever gone up, the same thing would have happened on a grand scale in Europe. Authoritarian armies can win wars (Nazi Germany was just as authoritarian as the USSR, of course, but the German army was surprisingly flexible) but the cost is terrible -- as some German general is supposed to have remarked after the war, "We killed four of theirs for every one of ours they killed, but there was always a fifth Russian." Yeah, you can win wars like that, but (unless you're as bug-fuck insane as Stalin) you don't want to.
Also? Shit like Abu Ghraib flourishes in an atmosphere of secrecy. Now, I'm not going to claim with 100% certainty that there was no abuse of prisoners in Desert Storm; there probably was. I can say that, if it had been widespread and systematized as it clearly is in Iraq, as a medic I would probably have known it was going on. And I never saw anything like that. We took better care of Iraqi prisoners than their own army did, which is one reason so many of them were so quick to surrender. Keeping things open is the best way to ensure that everybody plays by the rules, and that in turn can reduce bitterness after the fighting is over and keep us from having to fight more wars in the future.
I look at those kids over there now, kids like I once was, and it seems to me they have more to fear from their own chain of command than they do from the enemy. That's fucked up.
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I'll express it in Perl:
foreach (@foo) {
print "The $foo has."
}
You name it, it has. Army, Air Force, The Corps (by which I mean the USMA Corps of Cadets, not those crazy leathernecks), etc.
If the public can't hear the troops celebrating what works - including what they're doing that works - and bitching about what doesn't, that's a problem. However, even under the tightest of OPSEC controls, there's s
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Wrong.
In other words, if you are a clerk at a desk in Illinois (for example) we won't require you to submit everything you blog about, and will only do spot checks, but if you are a special ops member involved in secret operations we will check everything you post on the internet.
Doesn't seem unfair to me. Note that i
Won't change anything (Score:2)
The UCMJ has a huge number of laws used to keep "discipline and order" within the military
Loose lips sink ships... (Score:3, Informative)
In public debate, transparency and freedom of speech are paramount to maintaining the security of our liberties. Free speech is a crucial aspect of ensuring that a free society remains free.
But on the battlefield, the public debate has already ended. The security of society and its liberties is dependent upon the ability of military to do their job, and this requires that many things be kept secret from the enemy.
When I was in the military, all of us understood that an unrestricted flow of information to the public was a Bad Thing(TM). Speech has consequences, and updating the reg to include email and blogs is to be expected. Quite frankly, I'm surprised it took so long.
Most soldiers will tell you this is a matter of common sense. When I was in, we had only occasional access to email, and even then it was understood that we shouldn't put anything in an email which could be used against us or the Army.
Loose Lips Sink Ships (Score:3, Funny)
Wow... proper use of the word "loose" on slashdot!
Why do they need to blog... (Score:4, Funny)
if your gonna manipulate the press, control leaks (Score:2)
LoB
Common Sense. (Score:5, Insightful)
Far too easy to give away something that could compromise the security of a unit or a mission -- even if unintentionally. Taking this sort of precaution just makes common sense. The military is likely far more concerned with this type of a scenario than some soldier giving away some horrible conspiracy that everyone in the military is in on (in most part because these types of things would be impossible to hide and if they do come out are fringe exceptions rather than the rule). Most of the blogs out there from troops are of a personal nature or in fact shed light on the fact that things are really not going as badly as is portrayed in our media here.
However, as someone else mentioned, it's probably not going to be too realistic to enforce in the long run.
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This is not some big conspiracy theory as I'm sure many people here will immediately cry out about.
No, it does not seem like a conspiracy, just a political move to stifle dissent and misinform the people. I don't know that anyone was conspiring, just playing politics.
Far too easy to give away something that could compromise the security of a unit or a mission -- even if unintentionally. Taking this sort of precaution just makes common sense.
There are already rules designed to stop active duty soldiers from discussing anything that might compromise their missions. This is not an actionable regulation for security reasons. Do you truly believe every CO will be reading every letter and e-mail and blog posting from every soldier under them and looking for unintentional slips t
Well, they have no "rights" (Score:2)
Let's not forget, this comes from the same people that didn't allow the footage of how many and when coffins/caskets were being brought home from Iraq to American soil. When
The Republicans hate us for our freedom (Score:2, Funny)
I have some very conservative friends who are so embarrassed by what "their guy" is doing that I have stopped talking about politics with them - no need to rub their noses in it. BTW, I voted for Bush in 2000 - I made a bad mistake, but I am willing to admit it.
My wife and I watched Bush on TV yesterday. It seems to me that he plain outright lied about the appropriations bi
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FUD at its finest... (Score:3, Informative)
Civilians cannot be prosecuted for violating Army regulations - period. Saying the reg applies to contractors and family members is one of the best examples of journalistic disingenuousness I've seen in quite some time.
The Army can take action against a contractor up to and including cancelling the contract but they cannot take any action against an individual contract employee except to escort that employee off the installation and have him prosecuted by an agency that *does* have law enforcement capability - they also can't prevent family members from doing anything but can impose administrative sanctions against the family member. The Army has no law enforcement power against American civilians.
Simply put a civilian cannot be prosecuted for violating AR 530-1. There are other laws that *do* apply to civilians, but this ain't one of them.
Moountains and molehills... (Score:2)
Doonesbury act (Score:2)
Essential censorship (Score:2)
An insider's perspective (Score:2)
There are plenty of good reasons for this (Score:3, Informative)
On the other hand, it does inhibit forms of free speech. Its always hard to strike a moral balance in such cases when life and death are in the balance. In the past all mail was filtered and censored during times of war. This is nothing really new as far as I can tell.
Now sure what is so new about this (Score:2)
is nothing new in the military that includes all branches.
Former Military (Score:2)
As someone from the military, I've seen people respond in /. forums and say they were from the military. One noteable thread about IA had one supposed Army IA contractor talking about their issues and included something that had the guy been telling the truth would have led him to, as a minimum, interview with the Army's investigative services. Its stuff that the IA community would know in general, you could pick up an many SANS conferences, but its also stuff the Army says, you don't need to be telling.
Be
The UCMJ: The Abridged Bill of Rights (Score:5, Informative)
Much like other laws in the states, they are not always enforced but the rules are there. Military personnel have voluntarily sacrficed their normal civilian freedoms as part of the terms of service. I don't think it's fair to cry foul if the military wants to censor communications. We might not agree with decisions from the White House, Capitol Hill, or the Pentagon, but people wearing those uniforms are bound by duty and oath to honor and obey their orders.
Cpl Catdevnull
USMC 1987-1991
Top Secret (Score:2)
Ted: My orders came through. My squadron ships out tomorrow. We're bombing the storage depots at Daiquiri at 1800 hours. We're coming in from the north, below their radar.
Elaine: When will you be back?
Ted: I can't tell you that. It's classified.
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"Nick, I've tried everything: the embassy, the German government, the consulate. I even talked to the U.N. ambassador. It's no use, I just can't bring my wife to orgasm. "
Umm...So What? (Score:2)
No Surprise Here (Score:2)
The real reason for the change (Score:2, Interesting)
For the record... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:For the record... (Score:5, Funny)
After reading the comments at -1, the posters there say that he's quite a busy guy...
Re:For the record... (Score:4, Insightful)
No. That's what software is for. We know they're listening to every phone conversation using speech recognition; it is even easier to read every email. You don't live in the condition of privacy you seem to think you do. Soldiers, probably less so.
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Re:Soldier's what can't blog? (Score:4, Informative)
Yes...When I was in elementary school I was suspended for 1 week because I got into a fight at school. In return my father was reprimanded and went 1 week without pay. This was in 1999, so unless they've changed things, soldiers are responsible for the actions of their immediate family members, including but not limited to Grandparents and grandchildren.
Re:Soldier's what can't blog? (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps by the simple expedient of educating them that breaking OPSEC can kill. Which is the whole point of the exercise, despite the deranged ravings already showing up on
Plus if the carrot doesn't work there IS the stick which an AC has already posted about in another reply to your post.
BUt really, just what is the big freaking deal here people? What is NEW? The military has ALWAYS been paranoid about secrecy during wartime, or has everyone forgotten all those over the top posters from WWII? But I think I know what really has most of
Ok, that was flamebait but dammit some of you loons make it all too easy.
Re:what soldiers? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you hate free speech so much, leave. Go to some non NATO country.
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grunt's gutt feeling is.
Based on the conversations I've had with my friends that are in the military we are screwed.
Re:that's OK (Score:5, Insightful)
Couple that with reviewing all of a soldier's private emails, you may as well just ban soldiers from use of the internet altogether.
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This gives the command the authority to enforce certain necessary restrictions. It's highly unlikely that any commander will feel his/her troops have the time or inclination to enforce this rule to the full extent, and even
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If you think the US military has time to review all of a soldier's private emails, you're seriously misinformed. The military is struggling to recruit and attrition is at an all-time high. The only time this will be used is to nail someone to the cross who screwed up in some other way.
This gives the command the authority to enforce certain necessary restrictions. It's highly unlikely that any commander will feel his/her troops have the time or inclination to enforce this rule to the full extent, and even more unlikely that a commander would bother. This will be reserved for trouble makers or people who can't keep their mouths shut (which was already against the UCMJ) nothing more.
it doesn't take any time at all to say "don't blog and you can send one email a week." this gives them a guideline to block the activity altogether whereas the Uniform Code of Military Justice only gives them the ability to punish people after the fact for things that they already said )and therefore does require them to review the activity whereas this rule can be used to stop or slow it). also this rule applies to contractors as pointed out in TFA, whereas the UCMJ doesn't.
the whole subject is really
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And I still maintain it will be used no differently in the future than it has in the past; to add charges against t
The email thing is wrong. (Score:3, Informative)
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Fine, I'll go hire someone to write for me.
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Censoring other communication is for the same reason as any other censorship: hiding the truth. It is quite clear that the Administration does not want the opinions of the men on the ground to be known to the general public. It's bad enough from their point of view that no one outside the Administration has *anythi
Speaking as an Army employee (Score:3, Informative)
BS. Every soldier, family member, or Army civilian has access to AKO. If a member of a soldier's family does not then all the have to do is put in the request and it doesn't take very long at all.
Secondly Army regulations can only apply to people directly working for the Army. This means soldiers and Army civilians. The families a
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Bringing terrorists into this discussion like this was just silly. There's plenty more common criminals, and armed force's
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In a situat
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Well, I can't really say what the Army teaches, as I never wore a green uniform. All of the OPSEC training I've ever sat through was much more concerned with, as you said later, patrol times & the like. (In my case, port call dates, fuel stops, etc.) And since it's a matter of public record where ships are homeported, it's the simple matter of looking at the big numbers on the side & g
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Picture it: The first Gulf War.
Remember when CNN was there, with cameras transmitting from a Navy Seals landing site in Kuwait as the soldiers crawled out of the water, looking around at the cameras being shoved in the their faces, deer-in-the-headlights look in their eyes.
CNN and other news sites should be censored. The soldiers know what'll happen to them if they talk. Wolf Blitzer didn'
Not the same thing (Score:2)
Running away was preferred.
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Maybe, maybe not.
From TFA (pdf):
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Re:This just in:National Security requires just th (Score:4, Insightful)
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The constitution does not mean crap for service members...
You must've never served... (Score:4, Informative)
However, you also swear to adhere to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which during your tenure as a soldier, sailor, or airman, specificaly denies you a whole shedload of rights that a civilian commonly enjoys. IIRC, only the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Ninth, and Tenth Amendments are still yours to exercise (almost) fully. The rest are either restricted heavily, or gone entirely for you. You basically suborn yourself (and are protected by) the UCMJ.
To make it even worse, even years and/or decades after you get out of the military... if a crime or fatality springing from gross negligence happened during your enlistment or commission, or was due to something you did or did not do, and there's strong evidence that you might be at fault? the US Military has the perfect right to recall you to active duty for long enough to get court marshalled for it. As an example: If I had ever screwed up on one of the aircraft I worked on nearly 16+ years ago, and it leads to a pilot or bystanders or etc. getting killed? Well, they get to drag me back into the USAF and make me testify (and possibly face liability or charges) before a board of inquiry. In such a case, it would prolly be done to determine whether or not it happened due to gross negligence or if it was something that couldn't have been helped, or...? Pretty good incentive for making sure you do your job right and document the crap out of your work, isn't it? It gave me some very tight work habits that carry through to this day.
As to your original topic... while yes it is censorship, it also managed to teach such things as discretion, tact, and consideration. Between the reminders and instruction, and reading real-life cases concerning how certain inmates at Leavenworth got there? It was enough to sober up even the rebellious kid that I was at the time. I don't think there were too many other areas in life back then that could've given such lessons in such a stark, certain, and very easy-to-grok format.
Wow (Score:2)
I can certainly understand why public indications of low morale would be a problem since it is the object of the resistance to induce this and providing them with measures of their success might be useful to them. But, to me this is water under the bridge and should go into the lessons-to-be-relearned file. The main effect on morale is reduced support for the war at home and this is a result of obvious incompetence. Secretary of Defence Gates now has an even weaker hand to play a
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Nice alliteration, though.
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And yes, they can discharge him overseas and say "Good luck finding your way back to the states." Generally without much in the way of ID and no passport.
She also may find herself visited by some civilian law enforcement folks. I don't believe the military has any jurisdiction over her. They can make her husband's life hell, but it isn't going to affect her all