Very interesting story... ----------------- Troops are detailing their experiences in online journals, but military says some are revealing too much BY JOSEPH MALLIA STAFF WRITER January 2, 2006 Letters home filled with tales of death and danger, bravery and boredom are a wartime certainty. And now, as hundreds of soldiers overseas have started keeping Internet journals about the heat, the homesickness, the bloodshed, word speeds from the battlefront faster than ever. More and more, though, U.S. military commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan are clamping down on these military Web logs, known as milblogs. After all, digital photos of blown-up tanks and gritty comments on urban warfare don't just interest mom and dad. The enemy, too, has a laptop and satellite link. Nowadays, milbloggers "get shut down almost as fast as they're set up," said New York Army National Guard Spc. Jason Christopher Hartley, 31, of upstate New Paltz, who believes something is lost as the grunt's-eye take on Tikrit or Kabul is silenced or sanitized. Hartley last January was among the first active-duty combat troops demoted and fined for security violations on his blog, justanothersoldier.com. Throughout last year, the Army, Marines, Air Force and Navy tightened control on bloggers by requiring them to register through the chain of command and by creating special security squads to monitor milblogs. "The ones that stay up are completely patriotic and innocuous, and they're fine if you want to read the flag-waving and how everything's peachy keen in Iraq," said Hartley, who is back in New Paltz after two years stationed in Iraq. http://www.newsday.com/news/local/l...0,959146,print.story?coll=ny-linews-headlines
what a bunch of morons, the soldiers give their lives and cant even get their rights of freedom of speech and press
From a blog I just read... Every day I get the news (too much, tragic bus) An IED’s taken another youth (too much, tragic bus) I'm so angry, I can’t even cry (too much, tragic bus) The Bush cabal tells another lie (too much, tragic bus) **** you, driver, for getting us here (too much, tragic bus) Your kids aren’t trapped there, have no fear (too much, tragic bus) You’ve made it clear you don’t work for us (too much, tragic bus) And the wheels fell off your tragic bus (too much, tragic bus) Iran next, Iran next, Iran next, Iran next You caaan cram it.
I'm all for soldiers having blogs, but if they are giving valuable knowledge to the enemy that could get them killed then these kind of blogs need to be shut down. I dont see how anyone could object to that.
The same thing has been done for many, many years. Soldiers are not supposed to keep journals, take pictures, etc. because the enemy can use these to gather intelligence on our troops. This seems like a non-story.
