Photo By Staff Sgt. Andrew Valenza | U.S. Army Soldier Master Sgt. Charles Plantamura pins an OPSEC flier on a wall in the...... read more read more
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The primary responsibility of any operational security program is to prevent our adversaries from gaining access to information that can harm U.S. forces. Sometimes this means protecting those same people from themselves.
For Task Force Spartan and the 42nd Infantry Division, this responsibility falls to Master Sgt. Charles Plantamura, the Task Force Spartan and 42nd Infantry Division OPSEC program manager.
For Plantamura, this means he spends much of his time and effort in making sure personnel assigned to the task force and the division are aware of their responsibilities not to leak sensitive information to the public.
“The OPSEC portion of my job entails that we get the message out to Soldiers that even though they may have unclassified information, that information can still be used by the enemy to cause us harm,” said Plantamura. “The key is to identify what is critical information that the enemy might be looking for and then make sure that we don’t put that out onto various platforms such as social media.”
Citing COVID-19 statistics, Plantamura said we need to be careful of publicly releasing information that could be used against us by our adversaries, even if that information is unclassified.
“It’s specific information such as if we have any Soldiers who are currently positive; it all gives information that can be aggregated with other information to show this,” said Plantamura.
Plantamura went on to stress the importance of being careful about what Soldiers share online or by other open sources of communication.
“Right now, there have been estimates out there that our advisories can get 80 percent of the information they need to cause us harm through open source,” said Plantamura. “So the more we reduce that open source, the more secure we are, and that’s less information the enemy has about our plans and capabilities.”
To the Soldiers of Task Force Spartan, Plantamura gave a message of caution.
“Be very careful with what you put on social media,” said Plantamura. “Think about it, and make sure that if you’re on the other side of that, you couldn’t use it to your advantage.”
| Date Taken: | 08.13.2020 |
| Date Posted: | 08.17.2020 10:27 |
| Story ID: | 376140 |
| Location: | (UNDISCLOSED LOCATION) |
| Web Views: | 76 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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