The spy who blogged me

It was reported in yesterday's Sunday Times (the Sunday paper of the Singapore Straits Times) that several Singapore bloggers were told to remove their blogs because they had posted pictures of their recent army training stint in them. One of these bloggers goes by the moniker, Miyagi, and is supposedly a popular blogger. He writes a column for the Today newspaper, a Singapore tabloid, where he discusses blogs that others write. The people who issued this take-down order was the Ministry of Defence. The reason - that the photos in these blogs (and I understand there were quite a few) are potential sources of information for terrorists who may be scanning the environment, especially those of the Defence Forces' training grounds. Terrorists have only one thing in mind - terror and destruction - so the photo blogs had to go. Some people might think this is being paranoid, but I am reminded again of what Andy Grove once warned: "Only the paranoid survives".

I would have thought that these bloggers had greater sense than to put up such photographs in the first place, never mind that there is probably great pride in showing off their, ahem, man-hood to the world.

The repercussion of this is that the Singapore Civil Service will probably issue a circular to the effect that civil servants must declare their blogs (if they have one), and that these blogs must henceforth following certain guidelines. Well, no thanks, Miyagi. You have just inadvertently contributed to the gagging of the blogger community of which you write about.