Army Squeezes Soldier Blogs, Maybe to Death

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.

heh, there are quite a few geeks over in iraq and afghanistan. I used to talk to some of them regularly on Orkut. I know that some of these guys will be able to get away with posting almost anything they want to the internet, because *they* are the admins. So, it'll be interesting to see how it plays out.

Take away a form of communication with Family, friends and letting the world know how **** america can be, somebody's gonnaget angry.

A work around this issue is having the information posted by someone else not in the Military.