THE TENSION: WIRED: Army Squeezes Soldier Blogs, Maybe to Death

Here's a note for the few Pentagon folks who drop by to check on my blog:

When I was a boy, I inherited from my grandfather a seven volume set of books titled, "Pictorial History of the Second World War." The books instilled in me at an early age a fascination with combat reporting that eventually led to, in addition to the curse of dreaming in black-and-white, a journalism degree and gainful employment as an editor for some part of my adult life. What you see here is leisure time spent attending to that same interest, albeit many years removed. I post the military stuff simply because I am interested in it.

For the record, I am not currently in the military. I restrict the sources of military content posted on this blog to news and imagery made publicly available through DoD Web sites. I vet my sources, which are fully attributed and cited.

In the past the blog has enjoyed heavy inbound traffic from military locations. However, this traffic has all but ceased and I have since concluded this blog has been blocked from access by folks in .mil domains.

WIRED.com's editorial approach to this kind of story is probably at best over-reactive and at worst ideologically slanted. I include the article here because it is newsworthy. Read at your own risk.

Steve M

Army Squeezes Soldier Blogs, Maybe to Death
By Noah Shachtman
(WIRED) -- 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.

The new rules (.pdf) obtained by Wired News require a commander be consulted before every blog update.