Coast Guard Hates the Internet, Maybe

The Army cracked down on soldier-bloggers and Youtube. The Air Force blocked blog-access on official networks. All this despite the military paying lip service to New Media, the open-source phenomenon and information warfare. Now the Coast Guard, America's smallest military branch, is finally checking outthis whole internet thing -- and last week it totally panicked, maybe.

Here's what went down.

Periodically the Coast Guard brass, including Commandant Thad Allen, will pen messages addressed to the whole Coast Guard. These messages cover a wide range of topics: I quoted one this week that admonished Coasties for being rude to civilian sailors. Since the postings were unclassified but inside a secure network, a couple of unofficial Coast Guard blogs had made it their responsibility to re-post the messages for the general public.

The brass said stop:

THE COAST GUARD HEADQUARTERS COMMUNICATION CENTER (HQ COMMCEN) IS
DESIGNATED AS THE ONLY AUTHORIZED CG ORGANIZATION TO POST MESSAGES TO
THE INTERNET. INDIVIDUALS ARE NOT AUTHORIZED TO DO SO VIA ANY MEANS.

So what does this mean? It might mean that the public has lost some of its best sources for up-to-date info on the 50,000 people it counts on to keep it safe at sea. It definitely means confusion for Coastie bloggers, who largely had applauded the commandant's stated support of greater openness and who have read this as a step back.

Does this signal a coming crackdown on Coast Guard bloggers?

"Not yet," says Peter Stinson from the Unofficial Coast Guard Blog:

But the scuttle is that something is in the works. We'll just have to see. I believe that Admiral Allen is smart enough to realize that if he places any limits on free speech made outside of work hours without government resources, we'll just feed the hog.

What hog? The 1st Amendment hog, dude.

But wait just a sec! Coastie spokesman Jim McPherson says we've got it all wrong. He says that Coast Guard headquarters only wants to clear information through a single, centralized location before making it public on the Coast Guard official website:

The problem before was these messages were informally shared and sometimes they were inaccurate. They were not updated and when they where superseded, it was overlooked. The goal now is to have the uscg.mil site the PRIMARY official source on these important issues ... NOT the only place to see it. When you see it posted on
uscg.mil it is official ... not a draft, not superseded policy, etc. The responsibility is ours to make sure superseded policies are removed and the information is current and official. We want the information shared from this site.

Problem is that Coast Guard bloggers such as Stinson are reading this increased centralization as an attack on freedom of information. Who's right?
Depends on whether you'd rather info come from an single, official, vetted source -- or from multiple, but perhaps contradictory, unofficial sources.

McPherson says have a little faith:

We do not "own" the information. The public does and with obvious security and privacy concerns, the Coast Guard moves a great deal of information out to the public -- mostly good but sometimes bad. ... Admiral Allen is completely supportive of these efforts and this is what the term "transparency" means in action.

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