Facebook entry leads to military raid being canceled

Someone needs to sit down and talk to folks about social networking,
and things that people should just not do. The New York Times leads off
with a note that an Israeli Defense Force raid was called off because
of an entry on Facebook. There is going to be pain involved with the
debrief.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz explained that the
soldier posted a status update letting friends know that his unit was
preparing to go to a West Bank village near Ramallah: “On Wednesday we
clean up Qatanah, and on Thursday, god willing, we come home,” the
soldier wrote. Haaretz added that the soldier, who has been relieved of
combat duty, “also disclosed the name of the combat unit, the place of
the operation and the time it will take place.” After noticing his
indiscretion, Haaretz reports, “Facebook friends then reported him to
military authorities.” Source: NY Times

There are some seriously wrong issues with people posting
information on Facebook and not realizing that many others are going to
get to see it. This is more of a social issue, and one that we seem to
be missing when we discuss social networking overall. While there have
been many people fired for their various social networking posts, this
is the first I have heard that an actual military exercise was called
off because someone posted something to Facebook that they should not
have posted.

We really should start looking at what we are doing with social
networking and how we approach sharing of information. While the IDF
soldier was probably not thinking and just wanted to update his status,
the reality is that he also tipped off a lot of people that a raid was
coming up. We have seen that social networking is of deep interest to
governments. The Iran Green Revolution was tweeted,
with the US State Department asking that the site not go down during
the duration of the unrest that was happening in Iran. There have even
been arrests of activists because of twitter. What makes this unique though is that an entire military exercise was called off.

It is well past time that we sit down with folks and talk about
information that is good for public consumption and information that
should be protected. No one intentionally wants to end up on Failbooking
which is a wonderfully funny site that is all about the things someone
should never say on Facebook, I am sure the IDF members Facebook status
update is going to show up there soon. In the longer run though, we do
need to start having this discussion at work, and in our families about
things that people could reasonably want to know, against those things
that are career killing episodes that people really should not post
online.

(Cross-posted @ IT Toolbox )

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