Military struggles to control info. leaks
Siri Agrell
National Post
August 27, 2005
Most of the comments posted on Martin Anderson's blog are from his mom, his sister, his friends.
But on July 28, a message from a man called Tariq appeared: "U came to mi country for osama but u r doing other activities. Leve mi country as soon as possible. Don force us to fight against u people."
Captain Anderson had been posting on his Web log, Martin in Afghanistan, from the Canadian Forces base in Kabul, where he was deployed last February as part of Canada's military presence in the region. His site, designed to keep his family up to date, is one of a handful of blog sites run by Canadian soldiers in war-torn Afghanistan.
It is also part of a new breed of military blogs, postings made by men and women at the front lines of some of the world's most dangerous armed conflicts who are offering online, unprecedented access to the day-to-day reality of war.
As a reservist, Capt. Anderson's Web log describes the work he does as part of the civil military co-operation detachment -- building schools, outfitting hospitals and meeting with local Afghani leaders.
But in Iraq, where the casualties are distressingly high and the life of a soldier is more likely to involve armed ambushes, military blog posts can read like the script of a Schwarzenegger blockbuster.
"Whenever we had looked down a side street, there were always 10-30 insurgents with RPGs," U.S. soldier Neil Prakash wrote last week on his blog Armor Geddon.
"When we shot them, we either had to spray with coax or hit a guy with main gun. We could have killed so many more insurgents ... with a beehive round. But we were told those types of rounds aren't in service. Rumor said [they] are inhumane."
As Web log technology is helping soldiers like Capt. Anderson keep in touch with loved ones and giving Mr. Prakash's readers unfiltered images of combat, it is also putting their words out there on the World Wide Web -- accessible to everyone, including Afghani citizens like Tariq, who may wish them harm.
"I have no idea how he found me," Capt. Anderson said this week from his home in London, Ont., where he recently returned from active duty. "Maybe it was a Google search."
The potential security threat posed by blogging soldiers prompted the Canadian Forces last week to amend the standing orders for military posted "in theatre."
A paragraph was added to the wording of the operational-and communication-security guidelines -- or op-sec and com-sec -- ordering soldiers not to include any sensitive information in Web logs, e-mails or in online chat groups. "There are lists of things that soldiers are not allowed to talk about, whether it be in a crowded bar or in a blog," Lieutenant-Colonel Dave Anderson, chief of staff for Task Force Afghanistan, said from Kabul.
"Kind of like Peter Parker's uncle said to him: 'With great power comes great responsibility," said Lt.-Col. Anderson.
The U.S. Defense department has adopted a different and less honour-based system of regulating the Internet musings of soldiers deployed in Iraq.
In the August issue of Wired magazine, American journalist John Hockenberry said in an article about "milbloggers" called The Blogs of War that new U.S. policies require all bloggers to register with their units. Commanders must conduct quarterly checks of their soldiers' blogs to make sure they are not revealing any sensitive information, he wrote, and the Pentagon is conducting a review to "better understand the overall implications of blogging and other Internet communications in the combat zone."
At the Canadian Forces base in Kabul, soldiers rely on a truck outfitted with about 15 computers to send their daily messages home, check their e-mail and browse for "entertainment" via high-speed connections to the outside world.
Lt.-Col. Anderson said there is no official policy for monitoring the personal Web logs of Canadian soldiers, but that op-sec/com-sec training implies that there is always someone listening.
"We make the assumption that the enemy is smart and has the capacity, if not the willingness, to listen to what we're saying, whether it be in the e-mail I write to my wife or the phone calls we make back home," said Lt.-Col. Anderson. "But we're not muzzling our soldiers. We don't do that."
On his site, Martin in Afghanistan, Capt. Anderson said he regularly self-censored posted material. "I'm not an idiot. I know what not to say," he said. "You'd never know it was a stressful environment over there from what I wrote."
Under op-sec/com-sec protocol, Canadian soldiers can speak to anyone they want, but may only release information "that they own," meaning topics relating to what they do, their area of expertise or personal experience.
"They cannot speculate, they cannot talk about or debate policies that they did not make themselves," said one public affairs officer posted in Kabul. "They cannot talk about opinions on government or department policies."
But Lt.-Col. Anderson said there is no specific regulation to prevent soldiers from complaining about army life or waxing political about their role overseas.
"They're free to express their opinions," he said. "If their opinion is that the chicken is crap, it's quite okay for them to say the chicken is crap. And by the way, I had it tonight and it was crap."
American milblogs like Armor Geddon, A Line in the Sand, and 365 and a Wakeup have garnered loyal audiences with slightly more intense topics: frank debate of American foreign policy and descriptions of what it's like to kill -- and watch their friends die -- on a daily basis.
An Aug. 17 post by 32-year-old National Guard Captain Danjel Bout on his site, 365 and a Wakeup, described an encounter with a stray artillery round.
"Rather then wait around in the projectile's kill zone we jumped back over the beam and returned to the vehicles to call up the EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) team," he wrote. "The EOD team called back requesting coordinating information. 'How big is it?' they asked. I responded back with a highly technical infantry term 'It's uh... very big.' Their next question boomed out over the speaker box, 'Roger, is it fused?' I answered back 'I couldn't tell from our position,' hoping that would be the end of it. The next message was the one I didn't want to hear 'Understood, we will standby while you check for its fusing status.'"
As the Canadian Forces shifts its troops and its focus to the more volatile Afghan city of Kandahar, the chances they will face similarly explosive dangers could increase exponentially, and the harm inherent in revealing sensitive information will grow.
Already, Capt. Anderson said he knows of one incident where a photograph of "super sensitive" equipment was posted online by a Canadian soldier and quickly intercepted by his superiors.
"It was a picture that should not have been on the Internet," he said. "It came through a briefing and they were like, 'This stuff is unacceptable, make sure it doesn't happen again.' "
It is the dissemination of that kind of material -- and the idea that a soldier could unintentionally tip off the enemy in an e-mail to his wife -- that makes milbloggers like Capt. Anderson nervous.
"That's why I would say, if they haven't already [started to monitor blogs], they'll start to now," he said. "Maybe they won't shut you down, but they need to know if you've got one."
Army brass is not naive to the potential dangers of electronic communication, Lt.-Col. Anderson cautioned.
Part of the reason the computer access of Canadian soldiers is confined to a truck, he said, is so it can be shut down instantly.
"That, quite frankly, is to give us the means to turn those trailers off if we're in the middle of something," said Lt.-Col. Anderson. "The last thing you want if there's an event here is for someone at home to hear about or for a false rumour to get out. So there is an element of control."
Having completed his six-month posting overseas, Capt. Anderson will not return to Afghanistan or to his blog, and knows of only a handful of other Canadian soldiers who post regularly online.
"It wasn't really widespread on the Canadian side," he said. "I don't know whether it's from the top down, people saying, 'You will not breach operational security,' or whether they just haven't figured it out yet."
He figured out the potential reach of his site after returning from nine days of leave in Australia last June.
While he was away, his blog was selected as a featured site by MSN Spaces, the Web log service provider that hosts his space.
"I had 150,000 hits in one week," Capt. Anderson said.
When he showed one of the security officers in Kabul the comments Tariq had made on his blog, Capt. Anderson said he was given the green light to continue posting, but issued a stern warning about those who might be studying its contents.
"Somebody out there has you as one of his favourites," Capt. Anderson was told. "He's reading what you're writing, and he's reading what a couple of other guys are writing and he's starting to put things together.
"It's never just what you've done, it's what a collection of people have done that provides the information that allows formulated plans to take shape."
© National Post 2005
