EFF FOIA Docs: Soldiers Rarely Blog Information That Threatens Military Operations
Source: Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF)

According to documents released to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) by the Army and Defense Department, soldier journalists post far less information that could harm military operations than official .mil websites do. These documents call into question the need for new restrictions on soldiers’ online speech, which some critics say will cause military bloggers to cut back on their posts or shut down their sites altogether.

The documents, which EFF obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, shed light on the work of the Army Web Risk Assessment Cell (AWRAC) (PDF; 158 KB), a unit that monitors official and unofficial military websites “for information and trends of data that could be used to breach security or pose a threat to defensive and offensive operations and military personnel.”

According to statistics (PDF; 3.25 MB) obtained from the Army, the AWRAC spotted no more than 28 content violations on 594 military blogs (or “milblogs”) between January 2006 and January 2007. In contrast, the unit found at least 1,813 content violations on 878 official military websites during the same period.

+ FOIA Litigation: Surveillance of Soldier Blogs

This entry was posted on Friday, August 17th, 2007 at 1:34 pm and is filed under Internet, Military and defense, Privacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.