Now here’s a terribly progressive story – new orders from the U.S. Army direct soldiers to stop posting on personal blogs or sending email messages without the permission of a superior officer. Incredibly, as Wired reports “Active-duty troops aren’t the only ones affected by the new guidelines. Civilians working for the military, Army contractors — even soldiers’ families — are all subject to the directive as well.”
A copy of the new rules are available from Wired, but as the article notes “…while the regulations may apply to a broad swath of people, not everybody affected can actually read them. In a Kafka-esque turn, the guidelines are kept on the military’s restricted Army Knowledge Online intranet. Many Army contractors — and many family members — don’t have access to the site.”
Aside from the excellent critique on Wired, this latest move quite clearly ridicules the SSTR initiatives fomented by the Dept. of Defense Directive 3000.05, and is an absurd reaction by those who quite clearly do not understand that information invariably finds ways to break free of regressive frameworks that seek to contain it.
Technorati Tags: Censorship, Blogging, SSTR, Civ-Mil
Update #1: The Guardian has a story with a delicious irony in light of what’s written here – http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,2079659,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=20
isn’t this a clear absurd action against their free speech??