Operational Security question?

Question

Last night I posted a question about a friend of mine who is being deployed to the middle east in the immediate future. Because it was relevant to the question, I included the name of his unit, his name, and the day that they were leaving for training before deploying. His unit is based in the small town I grew up in and the fact that they are deploying is a big deal. So this exact information that I listed is available in several online news sources. In fact, that is how I obtained some of the info.

However, when I posted the question, I received two answers from people who said that it was VERY dangerous for me to post this info and that I needed to delete the question immediately. I did, just to be on the safe side, but now I'm wondering, did I do anything wrong? Because it seems like if this information was so dangerous, the government would keep it a little more secret. Everyone in our town knows the information that I posted. So tell me, did I do anything wrong?

Answer 1

OPSEC is extremely important.  there are bad guys out there who do NOTHING more than surf the internet all day long looking for bits and pieces of seemingly unrelated and unconnected information and sifts through it to get more detailed  ideas of what is going on.

Just because your local newspaper was  irresponsible and made it easy for  such information to be found doesn't mean you should follow their footsteps.

ambushes have happened because enough information was bandied about that  conclusions could be made.  people have died becuase some body spouted off without coinsdieringt he big picture.

NEVER mention exact dates, Full names or anything else that can be used agianst them.

did you know there are heinous people out there who scour the newspapers for names of deployed servicemembers and then they call the families and try and scam them out of money or other things?  or worse, pass themselves off as  casualty officers and erroneously tell someone their son is dead just because they have sick minds and get their jollies out of being an slime ball?  .  

Answer 2

like the first person, just provide a link. also, as long as you did not include their deployment window, you should be ok. if you did, then ya, that was a big no no. food for thought, never give an actual unit name, service member names, training dates, training times or deployment dates on the internet. im not sure why exactly the gov. deems it ok for them to post such info on the web as they themselves violate OpSEC by doing that. just put it in a way like this "my (whoever) is deploying soon..."  

Answer 3

Operational security is a weird thing.

Instead of posting the information yourself, try and link it from that news source you had.

Just use common sense about ti and you should be good. :D

Answer 4

First of all, the answer before mine made a lot of sense. Second, consider that by posting the info here, you've just added one more place where the information is available. Just because everyone in town knew about it, doesn't mean the guy planning something uncool two states over knew about it. Remember, Yahoo's a global site. Hope this helps.

Answer 5

You don't want to be the source where the bad guys got the information from. Like the others said, it's always a bad idea to post that kind of info on in the internet since you don't know who will read it and become inspired... :-(

Linking to the news source is a good alternative, but just how relevent to the question was the deployment info really? Could you have asked your question in another way without posting Sensitive information in your question?

Answer 6

When in doubt, Don't read it, Don't say it, Don't write it, Don't hear it, Don't think it.