TODAY: Blog away, but be mindful of security

I got to out–Gonzo the “Gonzo” Jour­nal in this week’s col­umn, even though I’d rather not have:

Removed post­ings restored after storm in a teacup over writ­ings on army life

THIS week, I received calls from con­cerned friends and rel­a­tives who won­dered if I had got­ten myself into trou­ble with the author­i­ties because of — sur­prise, sur­prise — my blog.

Read more at TODAY­on­line

Tech­no­rati Tags: army, blog, ExWallaby2005, MINDEF, nation­alser­vice, sin­ga­pore, TODAY

As you prob­a­bly already know, I got myself in the mid­dle of a debate over per­sonal free­dom and the need to pro­tect Oper­a­tional Security.

The Sun­day Times had reported how three ser­vice­men (myself included) were “warned” by the Min­istry of Defence about the unau­tho­rised post­ing of arti­cles and pic­tures of our recent mil­i­tary exer­cise in Australia.

The reporter had called Min­def to ask if there was a pol­icy about blog­ging and the post­ing of pic­tures about mil­i­tary life.

This set off a chain of events which led to my National Ser­vice (reservist) unit’s com­mand­ing offi­cer call­ing to tell me that there was some con­cern in Min­def over my blog posts and pho­tographs, as well as those of other national servicemen.

Being a con­sci­en­tious citizen-soldier, I took down all the posts on my blog as well as that on “Days Were The Those” (singaporearmystories.blogspot.com) — a col­lab­o­ra­tive blog I ini­ti­ated which takes con­tri­bu­tions of national ser­vice sto­ries from the pub­lic — while the mat­ter was looked into by my commanders.

There was no for­mal warn­ing per se, but rather, a reminder from my com­man­ders that while the Sin­ga­pore Armed Forces (SAF) encour­aged peo­ple to talk about their national ser­vice expe­ri­ence, indi­vid­u­als had to be mind­ful of oper­a­tional secu­rity — like the effec­tive­ness of the SAF’s weaponry — when doing so.

Not sur­pris­ingly how­ever, the for­eign press got wind of the story, and couched it in — how do I put this? — a dif­fer­ent language.

The Syd­ney Morn­ing Her­ald (www.smh.com.au) declared, “Sin­ga­pore has barred ser­vice­men from post­ing unau­tho­rised accounts and pic­tures of mil­i­tary life on the Inter­net in a fur­ther tight­en­ing of restric­tions on the grow­ing blog­ging com­mu­nity here.

“The new rules … fol­lowed the con­vic­tion of two eth­nic Chi­nese blog­gers for post­ing anti-Muslim tirades deemed as threats to social har­mony and polit­i­cal sta­bil­ity in the multi-racial city state.”

I’ve since restored my blog posts, fol­low­ing con­sul­ta­tion with my NS unit supe­ri­ors, who, together with their supe­ri­ors, agreed that while I should have asked for per­mis­sion to post pho­tographs first, there weren’t prob­lems with the posts about army life.

As you prob­a­bly also know, mil­i­tary blogs are not new, and have been the focus of some atten­tion, espe­cially from Amer­i­can mil­i­tary officials.

If Viet­nam was the first “tele­vi­sion war”, and the Gulf War from 1990–91 the first “live broad­cast” war, then the cur­rent Amer­i­can involve­ment in Iraq has a high chance of being known in the annals as the “blogged war”.

There are appar­ently sev­eral hun­dred mil­i­tary blogs in the United States alone, with mil­i­tary blog por­tal Milblogging.com list­ing 451 sites by US per­son­nel alone.

The pop­u­lar­ity of mil­i­tary blogs has led to renewed debate and some con­cern over the free flow of and easy access to infor­ma­tion online.

In August, US Army Chief of Staff, Gen­eral Peter J Schoomaker, wrote a memo in which he pointed to the need to pro­tect “Opsec” or oper­a­tional security.

“Some sol­diers con­tinue to post sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion to Inter­net web­sites and blogs, for exam­ple, pho­tos depict­ing weapon sys­tem vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties and tac­tics, tech­niques and pro­ce­dures. Such Opsec vio­la­tions need­lessly place lives at risk and degrade the effec­tive­ness of our oper­a­tions,” the memo read.

Writ­ing “in real-time”, as some ana­lysts put it, raises the imme­di­acy of the action, and prob­a­bly for the first time, the “live” reporter is the sol­dier him­self or herself.

Typ­i­cal of such a blog is “A Soldier’s Per­spec­tive” (www.soldiersperspective.us), where you’re likely to read about things that may have been already reported by tra­di­tional media, only from an actual participant’s perspective.

So, how do the rel­e­vant mil­i­tary author­i­ties deal with the pro­lif­er­a­tion of per­sonal mil­i­tary blogs?

A call to Mindef’s pub­lic rela­tions branch revealed that the proper pro­ce­dure is for a ser­vice­man to fol­low the proper chain of com­mand if he or she is unsure of the suit­abil­ity of the mat­ter to be published.

This applies to NSmen (reservists) as well as full-time ser­vice personnel.

Mr Miyagi aka Ben­jamin Lee has been enter­tain­ing read­ers at miyagi.sg for over a year, and is still count­ing down the num­ber of years he has left of National Ser­vice oblig­a­tions.