It All Depends Whose Arse Is Really On The Line

Bob e-mails to hep us to an interesting tally:

I have been listening to NARN a lot these last few months and it is becoming one of my favorites. I came across this article about how the official military sites have been audited to have thousands of security violations in their content while mil blogs only have accounted for 30. Might be an interesting twist to your gatekeeper segment next weekend. Keep up the good work.

Here is the story he mentions:

The Army's greatest leak of sensitive information isn't through bloggers, it's the Department of Defense's own official web site. These findings came from a series of audits (PDF) performed by the Army Web Risk Assessment Cell (AWRAC), which were recently published by the Electronic Frontier Foundation as part of its lawsuit to obtain the documents under the Freedom of Information Act.

The 10-person AWRAC found that despite the Army's claims that "milblogs" posed a major potential security risk to the Department of Defense because of violations to the operational security policy (OPSEC), only 30 violations were found on 594 blogs monitored between January of 2006 and January of 2007. Comparatively, official military web sites contained 3,900 OPSEC violations.

Given the disparity in security violations, it can be argued that the military is making too much of military bloggers. Consider the month of September in 2006. The military examined more than 209,000 blog pages, but did not find a single violation. In the three months previous, a grand total of three violations were discovered. During that same four-month period, the military discovered 571 violations on official Army web sites.