Get the fuck off my Internets, Pyle!!

This is a tad depressing, yet not surprising in the least:

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, obtained by Wired News, require a commander be consulted before every blog update.

But then there's this response from the folks living under this new regulation:

The soldiers who will attempt to fly under the radar and post negative items about the military, mission, and commanders will continue to do so under the new regs. The soldiers who've been playing ball the last few years, the vast, VAST, majority will be reduced. In my mind, this reg will accomplish the exact opposite of its intent. The good guys are restricted and the bad continue on... Operational Security is of paramount importance. But we are losing the Information War on all fronts. Fanatic-like adherence to OPSEC will do us little good if we lose the few honest voices that tell the truth about The Long War.

So, I guess it whittles down to this: towards the beginning of the war, military bloggers were viewed by the Pentagon and the White House as being generally good sources of P.R. Now that things are getting dragged out, tours of duty are getting extended indefinitely, and the mighty United States military seems to be losing hearts and minds (literally and figuratively) by the hour, this phenomenon is suddenly something the top brass has to crack down on.



Basically, we're seeing a large portion of the unfiltered first-person reports from Iraq get the muzzle because their stories no longer jell with what the Administration would like the American people to hear. Shitty in theory, but impossible to enforce 100% as has been mentioned. It's like photos of Alycia Lane in a bikini; if the information is out there, it will get onto the internet somehow.

Link via [Crooks & Liars] & [Wired News]