Social Networking Sites and Employees

[Tony Steele]

Yahoo just published an article that I wrote about Soldiers and the use of Social Networking Sites. The article can be viewed here:

http://voices.yahoo.com/us-soldiers-social-networking-sites-more-th...

Since Soldiers are notorious for inadvertently posting sensitive data on Social Media - the high usage of SNS by Soldiers poses a problem for Intelligence Officers (such as myself), who are often dual-hatted as the unit Security Managers. I'm curious as to what methods you, my civilian counterparts, have found to be effective in preventing the spillage of information on sites such as Facebook WITHOUT invading personal privacy too much.

-Tony

[Tony Steele]

LOL! Interesting tidbit on the candy industry. Unfortunately, the Army is quite the opposite. We can't really run the Army 70+ year olds :)  The majority of the current Army has grown up with Facebook and for most a fax machine is ancient technology. The younger Soldiers are used to putting their whole lives out in the open (on Social Network Sites) and don't see much of a problem putting their work affairs online either.

GEN Dempsey, the Army Chief of Staff in 2009 (now the Joint Chief of Staff), decided that Social Media was a necessity for the Army to develop leadership and run its operations. He actually made it mandatory for commanders to implement Social Media programs into their units. So, banning the use of Facebook, etc, isn't an option. Monitoring it is difficult as well. It's a huge security risk.

[Trip Krant]

The candy industry is incredibly secretive, but Tootsie Roll Industries stands out – they have the best corporate OPSEC I've ever heard of. The WSJ had a great article about them a couple years ago.

The employees are all ancient - the CEO is in his 90's, the president is an 80-something year old, and the board is mostly in its 70's. The company is run like it was in the 1950's. Wall Street analysts stopped covering the stock because getting information on the company was too hard.

I'm not sure its employees use fax machines, let alone Facebook.