A newly created team of enforcers will patrol DefenseLINK and other Defense Department sites on the World Wide Web looking for information that could compromise national security, Defense Secretary William Cohen announced Friday.
The 22-member team was created in response to a briefing held last fall by DoD information technology professionals for senior defense leaders. At the briefing, DoD officials learned that several inappropriate pieces of information had been posted to DoD sites, including names and addresses of senior leaders' children and a schematic of one general's house, a DoD source said.
The briefing was "a wake-up call," a DoD spokesman said. "It became apparent to the senior leadership that anyone scouring the Web can come up with very sensitive information."
The team, known as the Joint Web Risk Assessment Cell (JWRAC), will be made up of 22 reserve and national guard members from each reserve component, including the Army National Guard, Army Reserve, Naval Reserve, Marine Corps Reserve, Air Force Reserve, and Air National Guard.
JWRAC will police defense Web sites for information that could be used to breach national security or that would pose a threat to Defense operations or personnel. The team will also review sites' content to ensure compliance with departmental policies.
Lt. Col. Terry Jones, press officer for the assistant secretary of defense for reserve affairs, said there are two concerns about the project: that DoD "will go too far and shut everything down," or "let it all out of the bag." The Pentagon's objective is to strike a balance between those two extremes, Jones said.
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