I’m sure many of you have heard stories about people getting letters from people in the army during wartimes or even during peacetime with black, permanent marker ink across portions of a letter. Well it’s the 21st century and the army has taken to start censoring what soldiers can say on their own personal blogs and in email messages. They have in some cases went as far as saying that a soldier cannot even blog or send personal email messages.

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.

I do understand that they need to keep the soldier’s whereabouts protected and possibly things they are planning on doing to the enemy. I wouldn’t want my troops to be harmed more than they already are being harmed due to the lack of protective equipment.

However with the above said it still makes me wonder what is really going on that they don’t want us to know. It also concerns me because even if a soldier doesn’t give any specific information, just gives their opinion about the war in general, they would probably still be denied from posting that entry.

Also, it bothers me because this comes back to the fact that when you’re in the military, you are owned by the government. You are government property which is a whole other topic for another day.

Army Squeezes Soldier Blogs, Maybe to Death

Technorati Tags: military, blogs, milblogs, war, iraq, propaganda, wired, wired news

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007 at 12:04 pm and is filed under Daily Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.