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The Two Sides of Soldiers and Social Networks
March 3, 2010 | Neal | No commentThe Department of Defense announced earlier this week that soldiers will generally be allowed to self-publish via blogs and participate on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. The positives here are obvious and summarized by Pentagon representative Price Floyd…
as DoD opens up social media access… they hoped to see “more blogs, more tweets, more communication” between front line personnel and their families and friends back home.
We all know people who are stationed oversees or have a friend or family member serving away from home and in dangerous conditions. Anything we can do to make this job easier by making it easier for those who serve to keep connected with their loved ones is a great thing. That said, since we have someone with an intelligence background on the team, I thought it would be interesting to ask him what he thought of this announcement. Here’s how he responded after reading the article linked above:
As stated, operational security is a very important concern. As they said in World War II, “loose lips sink ships.” What if a 18-year old soldier Tweets that he’s looking at some great statue in a foreign country which reveals the specific location of his unit which in-turn leads to an ambush as they leave that place the next day? Or what if a braggart intel officer FBs that she’s getting another submarine cruise (and FB’s planned geolocator puts her in Guam) which could reveal the presence of a mission. Those are dangerous to national security.
In the Intelligence Community there has been a back-and-forth between greater or lesser transparency since the 1950s. For American society, it has reflected the changing tenor of the times… but in national security terms, its inflection points have always been one major tragedy that leads to a series of events that lead to another major tragedy. Pearl Harbor led to an era of increased transparency, which led to the Soviets acquiring our atomic secrets leading to an era of decreased transparency… and it goes on to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Phoenix Program/bombings of Cambodia, the CIA breaches of the 1980s, and, of course, 9/11.
For DoD to actually do this — as it is currently described — well… will be a bit of a miracle. We know from our work that the US is heavily monitoring social networks in hopes of leveraging them for intelligence purposes. We also know that insurgent groups in Iraq and Afghanistan have started to mine the Internet for information regarding order-of-battle information, optempo, and scheduling of events. How long until we determine that our enemies monitoring of social networking activities has been the cause of some great tragedy.
I’ll add a few of my own thoughts to those of my colleague…
- I’m sure regulations will come out about privacy settings on Facebook but we’ve all heard stories where organizations like the NFL, in an attempt to gain intelligence on prospective draftees, have created fake Facebook profiles of attractive women and friend-ed athletes in hopes of seeing what is on their page. This circumvents any privacy settings and it is easy to see a lonely serviceman falling prey to this sort of scheme from an enemy organization.
- Organizations that have been thinking about this topic for quite some time and implemented strict corporate policies haven’t gotten this right yet and all that is at stake there are PR concerns and maybe some small hits to customer perception. At the worst, a bad social media policy might cost a company a little revenue. In the DoD world, the stakes are orders of magnitude higher and one wonders what benchmarks and best practices the DoD might be using in a field as immature as social media policies and procedures. It isn’t like there’s a shining beacon of “we got it right” that they can point to.
In the end, I’m not sure the benefits of this policy outweigh the costs. There are person-to-person technologies like Skype, AIM, and GoogleTalk that are available to soldiers and their friends/families already. The marginal benefit of allowing social media into the mix seems to be low in comparison with the risk.
Tags: AIM, Digital, DoD, Facebook, Pentagon, Skype, social media, Soldiers, twitter
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