Combat Blogging Going Away

Wired has the story:

The U.S. Army has ordered soldiers to stop posting to blogs or sending personal e-mail messages, without first clearing the content with a superior officer, Wired News has learned. The directive, issued April 19, is the sharpest restriction on troops’ online activities since the start of the Iraq war. And it could mean the end of military blogs, observers say.

Hit the full article to see a pdf of the news rules. This pretty much will kill it though:

The new rules obtained by Wired News require a commander be consulted before every blog update.

They basically changed posting something “that might contain sensitive and/or critical information in a public forum” to…uh…anything! Ironic considering what they are said to fight for. This move to censor instead of train and enforce is not surprising given the desire to bottle up any information about Iraq. It’s telling, really. If there were a bunch of good stories to tell, you can bet they’d let that be blogged about.

Oh, before we go, one final ironic twist:

But, 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.