Facebook And Not So Super Secrets
Unit 8200 in the Israel Defense Forces is a signals intelligence group that has for the most part been shrouded in relative secrecy outside of Israel.
Enter Facebook!
A soldier from the elite unit was sentenced to a brief 19 day stint in prison for publishing photos taken at his base to Facebook. It appears to be the first case in Israel where a soldier has been sentenced to jail for leaking secrets on a social networking site. I'm pretty sure it will not be the last.
It is just hard to contain information in the face of the rapid proliferation of technology and the Internet. Before Facebook it was cellphones. Israeli soldiers stationed in various hostile areas were on the move with cellphones in hand. Sometimes the other side was listening.
In the wake of the Facebook incident, the IDF issued new warnings to soldiers on the use (or misuse) of information given the plethora of new leakage points. I'm sure the effects of the warning will fade quickly.
As for the jail sentence.... Probably not much of a deterrent. For an offense like this in the IDF he was probably confined to base and made to clean up kitchens or paint old fences.
BTW-- If you take a look at the bios on the Internet of management teams at Israeli technology companies you will often see service in this unit included. And if you look at other Internet data repositiories there is a wealth of information that can be pieced together on the IDF. Just do a search on YouTube and see what you turn up. You'll find an interesting miitary exercise here:
One of my other favorite armed forces, the Canadian Forces, is also wrestling with the Facebook phenomenon. Recently it noted that soldiers need to be wary of their interactions on social networking sites. The Canadian National Defense Department warned that terrorist organizations were monitoring social networking sites to gleam intelligence information.
Of course the Canadians should also keep an eye on good old fashioned garbage cans. Seems that 26 pages of blue prints for the new Canadian Counter Terrorism Facility were found dumped in the trash. You can read about that here.
Watch for my post on the dark side of Second Life.
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