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Anyone worried about military operations security on the Internet needs to take a harder look at the three-star officers dining in the Pentagon cafeteria rather than the MRE-consuming bloggers on the front lines. Compared to the hundreds of policy violations found on official military sites, bloggers in uniform have been a virtual model of care and discretion. Boing Boing blogger Xeni Jardin pointed out the vast difference found by a military audit of sites, and it makes the brass look awfully tarnished.

The Danger Room blog at Wired cited information uncovered by the Electronic Frontier Foundation about audits of blogs and official sites for violations:

The audits, performed by the Army Web Risk Assessment Cell between January 2006 and January 2007, found at least 1,813 violations of operational security policy on 878 official military websites. In contrast, the 10-man, Manassas, Virginia, unit discovered 28 breaches, at most, on 594 individual blogs during the same period.

The results were obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, after the digital rights group filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act.

The reason for the discrepancy seems obvious. Someone in-theater is going to be much more cautious about blogging, lest they put themselves or their comrades at operational risk. If we can trust the front line troops with a duty to protect the US, we should be able to trust them with WordPress too.