Army Spies on Blogs?

Even seemingly innocent personal blogs are on the Army's official watch list, according to a report leaked to the controversial Wikileaks website. Cue press release!

The ["Army Web Risk Assessment Cell"] is to "conduct routine checks of web sites on the World Wide Web for disclosure of critical and/or sensitive information that is deemed a potential OPSEC compromise." Web sites include, but are not limited to, "Family Readiness Group (FRG) pages, unofficial Army web sites, Soldier's web logs (blogs), and personal published or unpublished works related to the Army."

The passage comes from a March update to the US Army's 2007 "Operations Security" regulation 530-1, which is the Army's high-level document on how the service should keep secrets.

In an unusual circularity, the disclosure of the document on the internet today is something the document was designed to prevent.

It's worth noting, however, that beyond monitoring them, the Army has stated little interest in shutting down anyone's blog. "What we're finding is that that [cyberspace] is not necessarily a problem for us nor are we looking to control this information," Colonel Wayne Parks from the Army's "grad school" at Fort Leavenworth, said last week:

We're just looking to inform our folks well enough that when they say something, they are well-informed and they're going to state the facts and they're going to state, you know, the real reasons why we're doing what we're doing. I'm not too concerned about the idea of cyberspace and control of cyberspace, or on the ground or control of what out folks are saying on the ground. It's just a matter of good information and well informed soldiers and leaders.

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