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Military Blog Blocking and Government Leaks : American Troops vs. Hillary Clinton

By Andis Kaulins

This posting relates to the previous blog posting.

On a related issue, see the Wired article by Noah Schachtmann at Air Force Blocks Access to Many Blogs. Since the blog blocking done there is often done first, with questions asked later, is this not a prima facie case of prior restraint? We can understand why the military would have such a policy, but, on the other hand, it does seem to run counter to our ideas of democracy.

Schachtmann quotes the Air Force Times:

"AFNOC has imposed bans on all sites with "blog" in their URLs, thus cutting off any sites hosted by Blogspot. Other blogs, and sites in general, are blocked based on content reviews performed at the base, command and AFNOC level ...

The idea isn't to keep airmen in the dark -- they can still access news sources that are "primary, official-use sources," said Maj. Henry Schott, A5 for Air Force Network Operations. "Basically ... if it's a place like The New York Times, an established, reputable media outlet, then it's fairly cut and dry that that's a good source, an authorized source," he said ...

AFNOC blocks sites by using Blue Coat software, which categorizes sites based on their content and allows users to block sub-categories as they choose.

"Often, we block first and then review exceptions," said Tech. Sgt. Christopher DeWitt, a Cyber Command spokesman.

As a result, airmen posting online have cited instances of seemingly innocuous sites -- such as educational databases and some work-related sites -- getting wrapped up in broad proxy filters."

What disturbs us there greatly is the view that certain sources like the New York Times are OK to read and others not. In the period of the Soviet Union (USSR) one of the few newspapers available was that of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in the USSR, Pravda, and that meant "the truth", take it or leave it.

We think that there is no evidence whatsoever that the New York Times has any more of a hold on the truth than other publications. And does this apply to all city newspapers? Where is the line drawn? And who decides? How about a feature article on the miltary by the Economist, or a New York Times article which quotes the very blogs that are blocked, pointing to factual material that the troops should ostensibly not hear?

That the military CAN do this technically is without dispute, as the Internet is based on the previous U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) network ARPANET. Schachtman quotes one of the blogs that has been blocked for view, In From the Cold, which wrote:

"Obviously, DoD [Department of Defense] can decide what internet content should be filtered -- they spent billions on the IT architecture and billions more to maintain it. But if it's a matter of "ensuring worker productivity" and deterring "wasteful surfing of the internet," does it really make sense to block relatively small blogs (that just happen to focus on military and security issues), while allowing everyone to access ESPN or FoxSports? Wonder how much work time will be lost on filling out "March Madness" brackets, versus reading a military or intelligence blog?

In short, there doesn't seem to be any consistency in the current DoD policy. And that's no surprise. A few months ago, a senior Pentagon P.A. [public affairs] official told me that his service had no plans to engage the blogosphere, because their studies showed that "people don't rely on blogs for news and information." And he said it with a straight face. "

There is of course a legitimate security argument, but Defense Tech writes about that concern as follows:

"Defense Tech founder Noah Shachtman, who now runs the tres gouge Danger Room blog for Wired, is on the case as he has been since the beginning:

For years, members of the military brass have been warning that soldiers' blogs could pose a security threat by leaking sensitive wartime information. But a series of online audits, conducted by the Army, suggests that official Defense Department websites post far more potentially-harmful than blogs do.

"The audits, performed by the Army Web Risk Assessment Cell between January 2006 and January 2007, found at least 1,813 violations of operational security policy on 878 official military websites. In contrast, the 10-man, Manassas, Virginia, unit discovered 28 breaches, at most, on 594 individual blogs during the same period.""

Read also the comment to that blog, which says that the higher-ups are much more prone to leak information than those of the lower ranks, also because they know more. We have no way to check whether this is true, but it is one point of view that must also be considered.

Certainly the leaks that have come out of high levels of government in our lifetime are legion, and yet it is the normal troops against whom limits on their right to be informed is being imposed.

One example of leaks and their use is Hillary Clinton's recent despicable and "non-Presidential" attack on Barack Obama concerning a relatively unforgivable Canadian government leak of talks held by one of their representatives with Obama's economic advisor Austan Goolsbee - a clearly culpable intervention in the American Presidential election campaign. As Paul Loeb writes in Did Clinton Win Ohio on a Lie? at the Huffington Post:

"As Matt Wallace writes in the Daily Kos, "this scandal was manufactured out of whole cloth. Goolsbee said something consistent with Obama's official position -- that he wanted protections added, but it wasn't going to be a fundamental change or revocation of NAFTA, and that Obama was not a protectionist. This was morphed somewhat going into the memo, and now the embassy admits they "may have misrepresented the Obama advisor." Even after the memo misrepresented Obama, the Harper government took it a step further and then leaked a completely fantastic version of the story to the press, in order to maximize the bloodletting.""

So what we now have is a Democratic Party Presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, who has seen no problem with using this kind of foreign government leak material - and false to boot - to boost her Presidential campaign. We would say on the basis of her using such material that she has already disqualified herself for the job she is seeking.

There is another issue involved here. "Troops" are composed of men and women who are entitled to vote, and, as voters, are entitled to become informed about the candidates that they are voting for. If the military can determine WHAT they can read and what not, then it is of course clear, that they can greatly influence who those troops are going to vote for. As a result, we have substantial problems in limiting what troops can READ. It is another matter to limit what they can WRITE while they are a member of the armed forces, since being too lenient there could lead to intentional, reckless, negligent or simply ignorant leakage of information useful to enemies - it only takes one. Nevertheless, we see no empirically proven justification for keeping troops from reading blogs or anything else that they might want to read, barring proof to the contrary that this is harmful to the nation's interest.

Full post as published by LawPundit on March 07, 2008 (boomark / email).