The Navy will no longer host portraits and biography of ship or installation commanders on its websites, citing personnel security concerns.
These official pictures and biographies, hosted on Navy websites and social media pages, create an “elevated risk” for officers and their families, according to a Navy administrative notice, or NAVADMIN. Specifically, the directive regards officers and sailors ranks O-9 or below who specifically serve as commanding officers, executive officers, chiefs of staff, chief staff officers, deputies and command master chiefs.
Riley Ceder with Navy Times first reported on the notice on Friday.
“The security of our Sailors and their families remains the Navy’s absolute priority. In today’s modern security landscape, adversaries increasingly aggregate publicly available data to track, profile, and target our personnel,” the notice reads. “By creating an unnecessary spotlight and surge of online interest, routine command triad biographies inadvertently expose our people to elevated risk.”
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For commands led by officers at the rank of vice admiral or lower, the Navy directs them to no longer upload and host official portraits and biographies on “public-facing websites.” Additionally, those photos and biographies that are currently on Navy websites must be taken down, per the Navy order. The existing biographies will be maintained by the Navy.
The biographies on the Navy’s websites all follow the same format, with educational experience listed first and then the sailor or Navy civilian’s service history, including any ship or command leadership roles, staff assignments, brief deployment history and awards; essentially a CV like one would find on LinkedIn. Similarly, the official portraits are almost all in the same style, with the commander smiling in front of the American and Navy flags.
The pages give the public and press a way to keep track of who is leading what unit or ship, and read the service history of these officers when they are selected for promotion to major roles or relieved of command.
It’s not clear what this means for information posted about change of command announcements or morale posts made by units for social media that can include the names and images of these sailors. Nor is it clear if other changes are being made for how personnel or ships are tracked, such as commercial data collection.
