US Army worries more about bloggers than leaks back home.

17 August 2007

Since almost the beginning of Iraq II, the US military has been concerned about bloggers leaking information about upcoming operations and situations in the field that hadn't been cleaned up yet. Lately, they've been commanding troops to police their weblogs and clear all posts through a superior officer before actually posting in the hopes of minimizing the amount of sensitive information that gets out, which makes sense when you think about it. Remember what Geraldo Rivera did back in 2003? URLs and names of blogs have to be registered with the chain of command so that they can keep an eye on what's being said, and to that end they assembled a team of ten members of the Virginia National Guard called the Army Web Risk Assessment Cell to find and police weblogs for accidental or deliberate unauthorized information disclosure. In the process they discovered something interesting: Classified information is leaked on official US military websites far more often than on private weblogs. A study conducted by the AWRAC has shown that information with a classification of SECRET or higher has appeared over 1800 times on 878 official .mil websites, contrasted with 28 legitimate OPSEC breaches over nearly 600 weblogs belonging to military personnel in the field. This had lead people to speculate that the regulations were not put in place for the purposes of OPSEC but to discourage enlisted men and women from blogging at all.