The Philippine Online Chronicles

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) recently canceled a raid in the West Bank area after a soldier posted the details of the operation on the social networking site Facebook.

The unnamed soldier revealed the time and place of the raid, as well as the name of his unit, in a status update. Referring to a village in the Palestinian city of Ramallah, he wrote on his Facebook page, "On Wednesday we clean up Qatanah, and on Thursday, God willing, we come home." Sky News reports that the soldier, who was a member of an elite artillery unit, even posted his mobile phone number.

Other members of his unit, who were his Facebook friends, reported him to military authorities. As a result, the soldier was court-martialed and given a prison sentence of ten days. He was also relieved of combat duties and thrown out of his battalion.

Commanders, fearing the unit would be endangered as a result of the leak, scrapped the mission. In a statement, the army said,  "The division commander decided to cancel the operation out of concern that the information had reached hostile groups and would harm IDF forces."

According to BBC News, the operation pushed through several days later.

The inopportune status update is not an isolated incident -- the Israeli military has launched a number of campaigns urging its soldiers to be more careful online, and warning them of the dangers of exposing classified information.

For instance, hanging in military bases are posters with mock Facebook pages, bearing the images of Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and the Lebanese Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

The caption that accompanies the pictures and a Facebook friend request is, "You think that everyone is your friend?"

Given that many other Israeli soldiers have disclosed sensitive information through the Internet in the past, the IDF supposedly has a unit dedicated to ferreting out leaks that have been made in cyberspace.

It has also sought to prevent silly or dishonorable activity from being filmed and uploaded to media-sharing sites.

---

Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites