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Tweeting From the Front Line
blackbearnh writes "There's an interesting article up on O'Reilly Radar talking about how the US military is reacting to the increasing use of social media by soldiers in hostile territory. In an interview, Price Floyd, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, talks about the trade-offs between operational security and allowing soldiers and the public to interact, and how social media has changed the way the DoD communicates with the public. 'I think that we need to become much more comfortable with taking risk, much more comfortable with having multiple spokesmen out there, thousands of spokesmen in essence. But, for me, there's nothing more credible than the men and women who are out there on the front lines, fighting the wars that we're in, sending messages back to their family and friends.'"
...is only slightly less inane than farting
Up to the HEAVENS for the sake of OUR LIVES and OUR PROGENY. Ahhhh-men!
Up I say, for Twitter is gay!
Please, moderators. Mod the parent up. For my sake and yours.
It's hilarious that American troops, who are supposedly from a culture that emphasized "freedom" and who are supposedly fighting for the "freedom" of other people, basically have all of their freedom stripped away.
It's not a new phenomenon, of course. It happened during WWI and WWII, when any correspondence to and from American soldiers was read and censored by the military.
Right now my brother is in active duty in Afghanistan, and the fact that they have internet from their barracks is huge for their morale, and for the morale of his wife and my parents. The level of communication we can have with him is beyond what I imagine people in any past war would have dreamed possible.
He got to see his new nephew who was born while he's been deployed thanks to skype.
mod parent up. twitter sucks balls.
JUS KILD SUM HAJIS LOL !1!!
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
It should be Tweeting From Just Behind the Front-Line.
The Front-Line folks are too busy getting shot at to Tweet. It's the support folks who get to do the tweeting (and have all the other fun)...
With some sort of Algorithm could one not track troop movements and strengths then?
Ask Michael Yon.
http://www.michaelyon-online.com/
http://www.facebook.com/MichaelYonFanPage
http://twitter.com/michael_yon
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/3/19/
he talks about the trade-offs between operational security and allowing soldiers and the public to interact,
Let me rephrase that for you: they're torn between the need for operational security, and using soldiers for good PR. Otherwise, the press wouldn't have had to fight tooth and nail to be allowed to attend or photograph the ceremonies where dead soldiers are unloaded from cargo transports.
Blogging/twittering is just the modern version of the WW2 propaganda films. Look at our romantic heros, off to fight for justice and democracy! Look at our gritty, determined fighters putting up with horrible conditions and a bitter enemy! Give a voice to front-liners and you see what narcissistic people in the war want you to see. For example, the IED that gets blown up on the side of the road harmlessly...not the one that kills half the soldier's friends. And all the people with internet access are the ones doing Club Med tours- not the ones fighting in the trenches and caves.
One only need look at that attack helicopter video to see the stark difference between reality and what soldiers and the military want us to see.
Please help metamoderate.
Being in the military and deployed during the first and second rotation of Operation Iraqi Freedom (which was during the dawn of MySpace and Facebook just 'starting' to get popular when I was heading back to the states), I think my opinion would hold some weight as to say there are very few tradeoffs unless you make sure soliders Twitter and Facebook profiles are private and stay that way. I think with that, it would be no more insecure than having a weak password associated with your web-email account.
E-mail may not be 'cool' anymore to do, but it works and it's effective. I think the U.S. military caves on this because they share the same belief I do: it's a lost cause and too hard to corral. If you discipline or 'educate' your enlisted folk not to use it, some officer is going to break their own rules and do it and it's *always* going to be too-much-information leaked.
If you have 'that' much free time on your hands in a war zone, as a solider, to be updating your profile and status on social networks several times a day, you probably have absolutely zero business being there in the first place.
Before the Normandy invasion, the Allies used fake radio traffic, to convince the Germans that the real invasion was coming to Pas de Calais by an army led by Patton: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fortitude
Why not Tweet a couple of fake attacks to scare the bejesus out of the enemy?
Enough of these, and the enemy won't be able to determine who's who, and what's what.
C'mon lazy ass psych-op guys! Get on it!
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
study. _[rice.edu] slings are limited,
launches a strike at Arizona.
Yours In Juarez,
Nick Haflinger
It's hard to control all those foot soldiers with access to broadcast tech. So they have to educate them how to lie as well. For example, do not use "snipers" when referring to an american soldier, use "sharpshooter". Sniper sounds too bad. Also, do not use the term "the country we are conquering", use the phrase "hostile territory."
lolz gonna blo d crap outta sum other beyatches in tanks. ps I'm at 31.184609,65.912476 kthxbai!
Exactly why are US troops carrying *personal* communications devices during military actions? Sure makes it easier for the enemy to track the troops, what with all the radio traffic from cell phones.
Oh right... military intelligence.
Also, if you have a small group of family and friends who have been scattered to the four winds for the usual reasons, it's a lovely way to be connected to them daily in an asynchronous, casual way.
Yeah, back in about 1993 or so I set up an email mailing list for my family. It's just like twitter, except it's private, and we can type more than 140 characters if we need to.
We can actually access it from more places than we can access twitter (some of my relatives work at places where twitter is blocked, but our mailing list's web archives aren't blocked, and their email isn't blocked).
Anyone can send to it whenever they want, and the other subscribers asynchronously get the emails when it's convenient for them to do so.
what happens when cellular are captured by the enemy.
This is Sgt R Soldier's twitter, stay tuned to al Jazeera at 7 pm local time and watch his head get chopped off.
more tweets to follow.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
@SquadB Contact Right, Fully Engaged, Send Help lol? Like the MRE pix btw!
All this social networking tech has a flip side as well. Today's troops are comfortable with virtual relationships, and there are purpose-driven 'chat rooms' on the secure networks.
Now, a pilot flying close air support (CAS) over a certain zone can go to the chat the night before the mission and have a chat with the Army liaisons and they can exchange low-level info about what's going on. Then the next day, there's a connection between two groups that will never meet.
"Back in the Day" CAS was an anonymous plane you either cheered or cursed. Now it's a known in both directions. The pilot might start trying to get assigned to same areas, etc.
There's tons more lateral communication going on now in various communities (intel especially) than there ever has been before. And that's a good thing...
So if you allow troops to use the stuff, then the military can leverage that familiarity in "work-oriented" equivalents.
Yeah, serious OPSEC concerns, but considering how much is broadcasted right now through public media ("military starting offensive in Al XXXX in 2 days, tells civilians to evacuate"), what really is the risk for normal missions??
Posting AC because I can't remember my password. My son is a SGT in the army - infantry, a QRT platoon. We get to chat with him almost everyday when things are "calm". If there are deaths in the battalion then they all go on blackout for a couple days while the immediate family is notified - because it is very important to the military that notifications of death are not confused or communicated inappropriately.
Being able to see him through skyp and hear him is really the only way my wife has been able to remain sane through this deployment - and having my daughter-in-law and grandson staying with us while he is away and them being able to communicate continuously keeps his spirits up as he still gets to see his son grow up (age 2), even though it is from afar.
Quote from Heartbreak ridge - "not knowing is the worse"...
In Afghanistan, we are not battling an army that has the same technology we do. We're battling an indigenous people who have been at war for fifty years, either between themselves or against an invader. Unfortunately for us, the only people they hate more than another tribe is foreign invaders, i.e. Americans.
They are holed up in caves, stocking up on ammunition and resting until they have enough weapons, ammo, and food to launch another assault. Or they are building IEDs and monitoring regular troop movements to plant and detonate them. Their singular goal is to kick us out, and eventually they will. You can't occupy a nation, especially one as battle hardened as Afghanistan, when they don't want you there in the first place.
Tweet all the fuck you want. They are reloading no matter what lame psyops scheme you have cooked up.
Imagine if you were defending your homeland. What wouldn't you do?
During a previous excursion into sandy bloodletting, under Bush The Elder, one of the few completely trustworthy accounts I got from the battlefield was a letter from the son of a co-worker. She was kind enough to share with me.
There had been a friendly-fire incident that made the news. All the news accounts didn't seem to make sense. Everybody was spinning the story every way they could, madly, with little regard for truth. This mom, knowing her son was in the same group as the incident occurred, asked him about it. His letter, recieved well after the media circus had died out, was perfect.
What I mean was, the man was *right there*, 20 yards from the source of the friendly fire. He was *right there* pulling dead Americans who had just been killed by other Americans out of their vehicles. And his story of who was where and when they did what was the only account of that situation that I had ever seen that actually made sense.
Once you get off the front line, stories of war accrete bullshit until they're unrecognizable as even possible, much less the truth.
It's great to hear that, like any communication channel, that Twitter can have quite serious purposes. I've noticed a bit myself in a much less grave context - for example, Twitter noise on the matter has sometimes been the first to point out various news stories to me.
And even if your main use for it is another way to goof around, then what's wrong with that? :)
http://www.twitter.com/KingAlanI
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
http://twitter.com/shitmydadsays eh? Nice one. Some apparent crudity, but had some darn useful things to say if you can see through that. [FWIW, I'd say something similar about South Park]
http://twitter.com/RevRunWisdom (yeah, that's the Run from Run-DMC :P)
Even if you aren't much for religious messages, a lot of his stuff just plain makes sense.
(I'm KingAlanI on twitter as well; I'm not going for serious inspiration, LOL)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I think this is a great idea. It gives us real time feed of what is going on and the events the soldiers are experiencing right then and there. It also gives their family members a sense of what is going on with their loved ones and if they are ok.