[Infowarrior] - New Army regulations on blogs and emails

[Richard Forno]

Army Squeezes Soldier Blogs, Maybe to Death
Noah Shachtman Email 05.02.07 | 2:00 AM
http://www.wired.com/print/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/05/army_bloggers

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 Š 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 Š 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.