Top secret Israeli information added to Facebook

A soldier caused havoc within the Israeli military earlier this week, when he decided to post classified army information to his Facebook profile

A soldier caused havoc within the Israeli military earlier this week, when he decided to post classified army information to his Facebook profile on planned operations in a Palestinian settlement. Apparently not realizing the consequences of his actions, the solider in question posted a status update in which he mentioned that on Wednesday his unit would “clean up” the town of Qatanah, before returning home on Thursday. The soldier’s Facebook friends quickly realized that this seemingly innocuous status update constituted a breach of confidentiality. Rather than adding a comment to his profile, or sending him a Facebook message, they reported him directly to the military.

The unnamed soldier was almost immediately court marshalled and he will now have to spend the next 10 days in prison for having released classified military information on Facebook. The military also had no choice but to cancel the planned raid in Qatanah, after these plans had been published on the world’s most popular social networking site.

Israel is now taking much more drastic steps to warn its soldiers about the dangers of posting confidential military information on Facebook. For example, posters have appeared at most Israeli military bases depicting mock Facebook profile pages for some of Israel’s most avowed enemies, including Iran’s President Mahmud Ahmadinejad and top Hezbollah leaders. At the bottom of the Facebook poster is a rhetorical question: “You think that everyone is your friend?”  Israel’s military also issued a statement, in which it warned that foreign spies and intelligence organization regularly scanned social networking sites, in order to gather confidential information.