Wired.com has a piece today saying that:
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.
And they have a copy of the new rules, too. So much for muddy boots in the information battlespace (see David’s previous post) and the argument – proposed by winner of the US Army Information Operations Proponent (USIOP) essay-writing competition, Elizabeth Robbins – that:
Military blogs written by those in muddy boots… are a combat multiplier in the information domain… Commanders at every level must boldly accept risk in order to support the rewards and warfighting advantage that soldier-authors bring to the information battlespace.
