My Dots for Wednesday, May 02, 2007

An announcement: “Please keep fighting for our rights to freedom of speech, just make sure not to use it.”

Quoted: 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.

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Quoted: “The reputation of the Army is maintained on many fronts, and no one fights harder on its behalf than our young soldiers. We must allow them access to the fight,” Robbins wrote. “To silence the most credible voices — those at the spear’s edge — and to disallow them this function is to handicap ourselves on a vital, very real battlefield.”