An IDF soldier has been removed from combat duty after divulging details of an upcoming military operation on his Facebook site. The operation was called off as a result.
Some two weeks ago, the soldier wrote, “On Wednesday, we’ll be cleaning up in Katnaa [an Arab village near Ramallah], and on Thursday, please G-d, we’re going home.” He also noted the name of his unit, as well as the time of the planned round of terrorist arrests.
The soldier’s comrades noticed the posting and alerted their commander, who immediately took steps to repair the damage caused by the compromising of classified information. He sent the case to the IDF’s Information Security Department, at whose recommendation he then called off the planned Katnaa operation, placed the soldier on trial, and demoted him from his unit and from combat duty
A special case
Col. (res.) Ram Dor, former Director of the Information Security Department, told Army Radio that though information is often leaked via the internet, this case exceeded the boundaries of the ordinary.
“It would be impossible to comb the entire internet and find all the tremendous amounts of classified information there,” Dor said, “but we have to at least find what we can and take care of it. Some of the treatment has to do with awareness, as we saw in this case: One soldier messed up, but we see that the other soldiers were acutely aware of the security issues and they reported him.”
“We have often found information on Facebook,” Ram said, “with photos of soldiers engaged in military activity or in a war-room, with secret maps and charts with codewords in the background. We were able to reach some of these soldiers, and they were disciplined appropriately.”
Asked if it is feared that PA intelligence can find these Facebook sites, Dor said, “I wouldn’t misjudge them in this area... They probably also use Facebook, and they can get to the secret information even by accident. Their intelligence gathering skills are not to be sneezed at. I am including the Syrians, Iranians, and Hizbullah; they are intertwined in terms of intelligence gathering.”