TOP SECRET: FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY

TOP SECRET: FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY

You are going to see that phrase quite a few times in this diary. Why? Well heres a quote from this website.

The Virginia National Guard Web-trolling team "uses several scanning tools to monitor [these] sites for OPSEC violations," the Army notes. "The tools search for such key words as 'for official use only' or 'top secret,' and records the number of times they are used on a site. Analysts review the results to determine which, if any, need further investigation."

So you see, everytime I say TOP SECRET, I quite possibly make a list somewhere. Not that I'm military, but it doesnt really matter:

A Virginia-based operation called the Army Web Risk Assessment Cell is monitoring soldiers' blogs and other Web sites for anything that may compromise security.

The oversight mission is made up of active-duty soldiers and contractors, as well as Guard and Reserve members from Maryland, Texas and Washington state. It began in 2002 and was expanded in August 2005 to include sites in the public domain, including blogs.

TOP SECRET

FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY

More Here:

The Army will not disclose the methods or tools being used to find and monitor the sites. Nor will it reveal the size of the operation or the contractors involved. The Defense Department has a similar program, the Joint Web Risk Assessment Cell, but the Army program is apparently the only operation that monitors nonmilitary sites.

Non-military sites. DKOS, MYDD, Myspace, etcetc. Your friend or relative has 10 minutes at a computer and wants to post a quick note to his friends at home on his personal blog, well a Message from the higher ups details:

EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY, NO INFORMATION MAY BE PLACED ON WEBSITES THAT ARE READILY ACCESSIBLE TO THE PUBLIC UNLESS IT HAS BEEN REVIEWED FOR SECURITY CONCERNS AND APPROVED IN ACCORDANCE WITH DEPUTY SECRETARY OF DEFENSE MEMORANDUM WEB SITE POLICIES AND PROCEDURES, DECEMBER 7, 1998."

TOP SECRET

FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY

Now they say that this is all in the name of safety.

Unofficial blogs often show pictures with sensitive information in the background, including classified documents, entrances to camps or weapons. One Soldier showed his ammo belt, on which the tracer pattern was easily identifiable

Nevermind the whole Google Earth thing. Or a quick search on any search engine for 'machinegun' will result in a number of government, corporate and academic sites that show the layout of tracers in US machinegun ammunition.

TOP SECRET

FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY

No, thats a lame excuse and everyone knows it. As time goes on and they try and boot embedded reporters or restrict them to 'green zones' they really want to censor the truth.

Recently, shortly after his commanders discovered My War on the Web, Spc. Buzzell found himself banned from patrols and confined to base. His commanders say Spc. Buzzell may have breached operational security with his writings. "My War" went idle as he pondered the consequences of pursuing his craft while slogging through five nights of radio guard duty, a listless detail for an infantryman. More recently, the pages again went blank, as he chafed under a prepublication vetting regime imposed by his command.

Such prepublication censorship is rare in the modern military: Soldiers' missives haven't been routinely expurgated since World War II and the days of "Loose Lips Sink Ships." The Pentagon doesn't prescreen soldiers' communications, whether print or electronic, assigning the job of policing soldier-journalists to commanders in the field. There are restrictions against divulging references to specific troop locations, patrol schedules or anything that might help the enemy predict how U.S. troops might react to an attack. But commanders in Iraq rely on the honor system and soldiers' common sense to enforce restrictions. Infractions are in the eye of the beholder, difficult to define but easy to recognize in practice...

The blog entry at the root of Spc. Buzzell's difficulties was an Aug. 4 piece called "Men in Black." Opening with a bland, four-paragraph squib about a Mosul firefight that he snatched from CNN's Web site, Spc. Buzzell spins a riveting account of a nasty, hours-long firefight with scores of black-clad snipers. It begins with an enemy mortar attack and a testosterone-driven scramble to arms. "People were hooting and hollering, yelling their war cries and doing the Indian yell thing as they drove off and locked and loaded their weapons," he writes. He describes a harrowing ambush. "Bullets were pinging off our armor all over our vehicle, and you could hear multiple RPG's [rocket-propelled grenades] being fired and flying through the air and impacting all around us," he writes. "I've never felt fear like this. I was like, this is it, I'm going to die."

Spc. Buzzell's account caught the attention of the News Tribune in Tacoma, Wash., the newspaper that covers Spc. Buzzell's home base of Fort Lewis. Noting that the attack got scant coverage by bigger media, the local paper drew heavily from Spc. Buzzell's anonymous account. The Pentagon's internal clip service picked up the News Tribune story and it landed in the hands of commanders in Iraq.

Within hours, Lt. Col. Buck James, the battalion commander, ordered Spc. Buzzell to his office. Spc. Buzzell quickly shaved and grabbed fresh fatigues to see the colonel he had never met. As he later recounted on his blog, he arrived to find Col. James leafing through a massive printout of his Web writings, which someone had marked up with a yellow pen. The colonel, whom Spc. Buzzell described as a cross between George Patton and Vince Lombardi, opened with a question: " 'Youre [sic] a big Hunter S Thompson Fan, arnt [sic] you?'"

Spc. Buzzell says he was called to account for two details: the observation that his unit ran low on water during the hours-long standoff and a description of the steps he took to get more ammunition as the firefight waxed on. Both were excised from his online archives.

TOP SECRET

FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY

Many soldiers note:

It appears to be very subjective as to what is and isn't allowed, so to keep from violating some Army reg, policy, or wish of the commander

Write that you painted a school and hugged an Iraqi and things will be grand. Write that your unit came under attack and your career may be over.

To keep from violating some Army reg, policy, or wish of the commander, milblog has been shutdown by Author on October 17, 2006.

or

Folks, this is a short lived Blog, because:

I've already been talked to once about my content and had to "edit" it. Today we had a briefing on Blogs "do's and don't" for the Army.

or

As of today, May 5th, 2006, I am officially shutting down my blog... There are certin [sic] commands out there that do NOT want me to blog... they have been trying very hard to find out who I am and shut me down... I really don't want to end my military career over a blog - it has gotten THAT bad!

Blogs arent the only thing. Just the other day the NYTIMESran a story about Iraqi insurgents using YouTube to spread fear. Youtube = bad. Republican campaign ads that promote Bin Laden's message = Good.

TOP SECRET

FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY