Lip-zip sinks Army blogs?

The Army has ordered a halt on soldiers' blogs.

A new directive requires U.S. soldiers to consult a commander before every post to a personal blog, Wired reports.

The rules could even extend to comments on Internet message boards, resumes or letters home, the article states.

Releasing classified information has, of course, always been prohibited, but observers say the new rules focus on seemingly innocuous information that may be revealing to enemies.

Blog community response:

"It's been a constant struggle for the services to balance the rights of free speech with the genuine need to keep information useful to the enemy out of his hands ? especially in the electronic media world. The updated regulations give a lot of leeway to unit commanders to regulate the information flow from their soldiers, but one has to wonder whether superiors will err on the side of caution and ban out of hand all blogs authored by troops on deployment."
--DefenseTech.org

"This is wrong in so many ways. The guys and gals that fight for 'freedom of speech' for Iraqi's can't even practice that freedom for themselves."
--The Morningwood News

"Ever seen written letters with black bars through half of the words? That's how the military's been doing it for ages now, but in the digital world that's not exactly going to work. So they ban blogs to prevent the spread of intelligence to the enemy. There's absolutely nothing wrong with this policy. It will likely save the lives of servicemen and others in Iraq."
--Digg

"While I will admit to not regularly following any blogs written by active duty soldiers on the ground in Iraq, I do count on them to keep the MSM honest with their Iraq reporting. Military bloggers provide a check on a media establishment that may have a vested interest in letting a big disturbing story slip through the cracks or who choose to report administration propaganda without critical examination. I find this very troubling."
--Daily Kos