MilBlog pushback from the military
Wired (Xeni Jardin):
Some of the web’s more popular “milblogs” — blogs maintained by present or former active duty military personnel — are going quiet following a renewed push by U.S. military officials to scan sites for security risks.
This bit of news has been out for quite some time, kicked off by a leak of an Army memo on establishing OPSEC guidelines for soldier blog postings, so I’m surprised to see Wired just getting around to covering it now. The “new” news here is the standing up of the Virgina Army National Guard unit focused on tracking OPSEC (”operational security”) violations among milbloggers, photo sharing sites, etc.
While I was in the Reserves, that memo kicked off mandatory OPSEC training for all soldiers (if you have served, you probably have some idea just how exciting this death-from-PPT brief was). While I have the utmost respect for the officer who had to deliver the deck, which was no doubt handed down along with the tasking from on high back East, I was a bit shocked at how alarmist the whole thing was.
They basically took a few negative examples, and blew them up as respresentative of a general threat that all online communication from soldiers deployed in theater posed. The presentation basically ignored the very real value all these blogs, photos, and emails provide - both in helping soldiers, Marines, sailors, and airmen connect back with home, but also in helping those of us not stuck in the sand understand what this otherwise remote war is actually like – the good, bad, and ugly, the horrors and the triumps all in one.
It’s that complete picture, of true stories from those who live it, without the filter of military Public Affair Officers (PAOs), that the public find enthralling, connect with emotionally, and ultimately will use to judge this war. It’s the difference between looking at World War II through the bland text of a history book vs. through the eyes of the anti-hero heoroes who raised the flag on Iwo Jima (see that movie, or better go read the book, btw).
MilBlogs have the power to create that emotional understanding of what the Iraq War really is, through the experiences of those fighting in it, as it happens. This is an incredibly powerful use of blogs, perhaps the most powerful, and it stands to fundamentally redefine how quickly public opinion about wars is shapped (that being a good thing or a bad thing, depends on your perspective).
So there is a fine line between maintaining needed OPSEC – the Army equivalent of Microsoft’s employee blog rule of “don’t blog stupid” – and shutting off a truly revolutionary channel for the public to understand the War and connect directly with those fighting it.
In any case, the best resource for the latest on this are the milbloggers themselves – start with Blackfive, a former intel officer who recently authored a book (which I need to get around to reading…) on the subject of milblogs. His take is balanced:
I have known of bloggers (one is an author in “The Blog of War”) who had their Division Commander approve of what they were doing…only to discover that the Army (DoA) had them listed on a Power Point Presentation about OPSEC violators. Yours truly and “the Donovan” were also listed. This “recognition” effectively killed their blogs which were popular first hand sources of the war experience.
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However, the watchdog should also realize that coming down on bloggers for some (perceived) OPSEC violations might be a bit ridiculous – especially when there are photos and explicit descriptions of weapon systems and procedures that are publicly available on civilian (ie. FAS) or military/DoD websites.
Warning bloggers of possible violations is a good thing. But mindlessly cracking down on them without considering the consequences to the positive information flow will only create a cadre of negative military bloggers flying under the radar that will become the anti-military poster children for the New York Times and CNN.
