US Army sued for surveillance of sites, soldiers' blogs

05.02.2007
A U.S. Army unit that monitors thousands of Web sites and soldiers' blogs looking for sensitive military information has been hit with a Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) lawsuit by a San Francisco-based privacy group that wants to know more about the monitoring program.

In a lawsuit () filed in U.S. District Court in Washington last week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said that despite several requests for information from the Army unit, known as the Army Web Risk Assessment Cell (AWRAC), no answers have been provided.

Marcia Hofmann, a Washington-based staff attorney for the EFF, said the FoIA lawsuit is aimed at protecting free speech and privacy and helping soldiers and other Americans understand how and why Web sites and soldiers' blogs are being monitored. "The idea is to get more information on what the Army is doing," Hofmann said. "Some soldier bloggers choose not to blog because of concerns about what they can and can't say" online.

The EFF wants to know how AWRAC finds and monitors Web sites and blogs and how it asks people to remove information from them, she said. The EFF also wants to know what specific rules and protocols the unit uses to determine what information is sensitive and why, as well as whether blogs and Web sites of civilians are also being scrutinized, she said.

"This is a compelling question ... and the public should know more about it," Hofmann said.

In an about the lawsuit last week, the EFF said that some bloggers have cut back on their posts or shut down their sites after being contacted by the AWRAC. "Soldiers should be free to blog their thoughts at this critical point in the national debate on the war in Iraq," Hofmann said. "If the Army is coloring or curtailing soldiers' published opinions, Americans need to know about that interference."