Army Squeezes Soldier Blogs, Maybe to Death

[Capper]

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.

Army Squeezes Soldier Blogs, Maybe to Death -

[Panda Man]

I thought it said boob instead of blog at first :P

I fail to see any real problem here, I haven't heard of bloggers giving out military secrets, just sharing their experiences. So they go off to fight for us and we don't even give them their first amendment rights any more? WTF!?

That's all I'm going to say on the issue.

[screwballl]

This is just a simple squeeze on the military from the media saying these blogs that state that we are actually getting things done over there is undermining their reporting that things are on the verge of collapse.
Special Interests at work. I say give them more access so the world can see what is really happening rather then what aljazeera and the media "claim" is happening.

[garetjax]

I think it's BS. The Army, like any military branch, will instruct you and order you to do all kinds of things. But the one thing they can't do is tell you what you can and cannot do in your personal life, within reason. This includes blogging. Unless what the soldiers are reporting is secret and could compromise military efforts, or objectionable content that portrays the Army in a negative light, there isn't much that the Army can do.

The only reason I can see the Army going to such lengths as to stiffle what the soldiers report is if the soldiers do it on US government computer hardware. And if that's the case, the soliders really have no authorization (according to regulations) to engage in those kinds of actions.