RICHMOND, Va. (AP) -- From the front lines of Iraq and Afghanistan to here at home, soldiers blogging about military life are under the watchful eye of some of their own.

A Virginia-based operation, the Army Web Risk Assessment Cell, monitors official and unofficial blogs and other Web sites for anything that may compromise security. The team scans for official documents, personal contact information and pictures of weapons or entrances to camps.

In some cases, that information can be detrimental, said Lt. Col. Stephen Warnock, team leader and battalion commander of a Manassas-based Virginia National Guard unit working on the operation.

In one incident, a blogger was describing his duties as a guard, providing pictures of his post and discussing how to exploit its vulnerabilities. Other soldiers posted photos of an Army weapons system that was damaged by enemy attack, and another showed personal information that could have endangered his family.

"We are a nation at war," Warnock said by e-mail. "The less the enemy knows, the better it is for our soldiers."

In the early years of operations in the Middle East, no official oversight governed Web sites that sprung up to keep the families of those deployed informed about their daily lives.

The oversight mission, made up of active-duty soldiers and contractors, as well as Guard and Reserve members from Maryland, Texas and Washington state, began in 2002 and was expanded in August 2005 to include sites in the public domain, including blogs.

The Army will not disclose the methods or tools being used to find and monitor the sites. Nor will it reveal the size of the operation or the contractors involved. The Defense Department has a similar program, the Joint Web Risk Assessment Cell, but the Army program is apparently the only operation that monitors nonmilitary sites.



Now soldiers wishing to blog while deployed are required to register their sites with their commanding officers, who monitor the sites quarterly, according to a four-page document of guidelines published in April 2005 by Multi-National Corps-Iraq.

Spc. Jean-Paul Borda, who has indexed thousands of military blogs for a site called Milblogging.com, said in an e-mail interview that the military still is adapting to changing technology.

"This is a new media - Blogging. Podcasting. Online videos," wrote Borda, 32, of Dallas, who kept a blog while he was deployed in Afghanistan with the Virginia National Guard. "The military is doing what it feels necessary to ensure the safety of the troops."

Warnock said the Web risk assessment team has reviewed hundreds of thousands of sites every month, sometimes e-mailing or calling soldiers asking them to take material down. If the blogger doesn't comply with the request, the team can work with the soldier's commanders to fix the problem - that is, if the blogger doesn't post anonymously.

"We are not a law enforcement or intelligence agency. Nor are we political correctness enforcers," Warnock said. "We are simply trying to identify harmful Internet content and make the authors aware of the possible misuse of the information by groups who may want to damage United States interests."

Some bloggers say the guidelines are too ambiguous - a sentiment that has led others to pre-emptively shut down or alter their blogs.

"It's impossible to determine when something crosses the line from not a violation to a violation. It's like trying to define what pornography is or bad taste in music," said Spc. Jason Hartley, 32, who says he was demoted from sergeant and fined for reposting a blog he created while deployed to Iraq with the New York Army National Guard.

According to Hartley, the Army had forced him to stop the blog even before the oversight operation existed, citing pictures he had posted of Iraqi detainees and discussions of how he loaded a weapon and the route his unit took to get to Iraq.

Warnock contended that soldiers should not be discouraged from blogging altogether.

Military bloggers "are simply expressing themselves in a wide open forum and want to share their life-changing experiences with the rest of the world," Warnock said. "Giving soldiers an outlet for free expression is good. American soldiers are not shy about giving their opinions and nothing the Web Risk Cell does dampens that trait."

Matthew Currier Burden, 39, a former intelligence officer who wrote "The Blog of War," a collection of entries from bloggers who served in the war, said soldiers' Web sites can go a long way toward portraying positive aspects of the war and other "stories that need to get told."

But he said it's legitimate to fear that some information could be used the wrong way.

"The enemy knows the value of the blogs," Burden said. "The biggest thing that we fear is battle damage assessment from the enemy. We want to deny them that."

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On the Net:

Milblogging: http://www.milblogging.com

Burden's blog: http://www.blackfive.net

In the beginning of this ludicrous and surreal hell I find myself in now, which has been created for me and many others by bushco and halliburton and cowboys everywhere, I saw a banner on the net for a very odd survey entitled ARE YOU SMARTER THAN gEORGE bUSH?

I thought that was real weird, asking myself Who's NOT? The guys a politician, he is a paid whore representing money interests, mostly banking. They all are. Or so I thought. I was mostly right, but have become introduced to another facet of the bush people, and it is this facet I am writing about.

bush and family are exceedingly accomplished at LOOKING stupid, although I think this charade hides viciousness and deceit a lot more than intellect. They are a lot like the hispanix who have a perfectly clear understanding of our language but go around crying -- no spikky engli -- so they can hide their machinations and true agendas. The bush people are not stupid, but neither are they smart. They cannot innovate, they just steal real well.

They are exceptional thieves, yes, and assassins too, and they have been for quite some time. They use surveillance in all its forms in conjunction with stolen moneys, to develop more surveillance and steal a lot more.

They have been privy to the fact that there are ruins on moon and mars, for a long time now. There are others here like them, as well, and that group can be traced to all of hitlers friends and financiers, the higher they are in the pecking order, the more they know about all this. They like to use this hidden knowledge as religious control, which pretty much says it all right there, the kind of minds they appeal to, the kind of minds they schnooker with hocus pocus miraculous mumbo jumbo and idiotic tales for childish minds.

To prove bush is just a vicious thief, like all his family and friends, is not hard, because even though they steal and keep secret a lot of information, they still cannot intuit correctly and understand that even though they have this technology from a world before, this world was not like it is today, it was not populated by people. It was much much different, it was a DEDICATED world, for one purpose only. Earth was indeed the garden, an agricultural planet that, having been mined extensively, was turned into the producer of all that had been engineered to feed mankinds body heart and soul. It is the only survivor of something that was once great, but is now pathetic and devolved arrogance.

Yes, we were advanced at one time, but you cannot tell by looking at bush and his antics, nor the antics of the rest of his family.



The technology they have deployed here, spraying chemicals from the sky daily, causes mutation and harm, though the bush freaks believe that by ignoring the disattributes and lying like they always have, it will make the troubles go away. They call their actions initiative, but it is not initiative. It is DISASTER.

They cooperated with world powers such as Russia to create a massive drought here using the very same technology they now deploy to FIX the problem they helped create! It is all about making the public think something (Or nothing!) so that electronic mind control can be moved in disguised as weather control.

Also, the antennae working now in full grid sequence and phased array across the entire world are actually a multitude of invisible weaponry, and are available to bushco and his corrupt followers. Individuals can be, and are, targeted on a daily basis. Control. total Control is what they are after. At all costs. And the harm caused by this human experimentation of the nazi 4th reich trying to take over America is cumulative.

PLUS -- everyone is MUCH more sensitive to the electronics of this bushco grid, because a lot of stuff they have been spraying non-stop since 911 is metallic in nature. Its in you now, and your food, and your water, and you just get more and more electro-sensitive to the nazi technology of bushchimp every day!

These criminals like jorge arbusto and their new world vatican order are not above blasting out parts of the atmosphere to cause searing radiation below, and yet more need for their foul chemicals to be sprayed daily. In fact they have done it many times and there are records of it. They tell their followers anything, and their followers want to believe so badly, and those followers REALLY want their government homeland security checks to continue, so they lap up the lies and laughable intellectual geegaws that bushco throws out like manna from heaven. Poor idiotic chimps and undernourished spirits that they are. Remember: there is mandatory religious instruction in 6 states of russia right now.

These things I speak of here do not even include satellites, which are all in place now and can literally see you even if you are 400 feet below ground! (EPT). The visualization is now perfect. This means in your house too. All the cops know about broadcast law enforcement, they see it as an easy way to collect their paychecks, and keep the rabble in line, instead of discouraging alcohol use, which should be used as vehicle fuel, but now only fuels the violence that keeps the banks police in place.

the bush family is a disaster born of lies and stupidity. And as always, their prey ALWAYS pay the price. Totally replace Americas Government officials, BY WHATEVER MEANS NECESSARY, with Americans, and not representatives of world banking. Before its too late.