THE DAY ALLIED FORCES began their invasion of Iraq, a Navy lieutenant based in the Gulf posted some news on his personal Web site: “Saddam fired a couple of those Scuds that he doesn’t have at me.” On another personal Web site someone claiming to be a Baghdad resident wrote that “there are more Ba’ath people in the streets and they have more weapons.” Kevin Mickey, a Navy lieutenant commander at Camp Patriot, Kuwait, noted on his site that “we had a minor dust storm yesterday” and said the camp’s missile alarms were going off repeatedly.

On top of the 500 reporters traveling with the military and the three cable-TV news channels beaming 24-hour coverage there’s a new element in this war: unfiltered eyewitness accounts online.

Soldiers and citizens in the war zone are publishing in real time on their own Web sites. Families are posting on the Web the e-mails sent home by relatives in the service. And free-lance reporters — not subject to restrictions by the Pentagon or large media outlets — are writing online for a new world-wide audience.

Lt. Cmdr. Mickey, a 39-year-old reservist, says in an e-mail that he runs his own Web log, The Primary Main Objective, on his camp’s computer network. On it he has posted pictures, news of missile alerts and a recent trip in the Iraqi desert. Certain parts of the camp are off-limits for photography and Lt. Cmdr. Mickey says he doesn’t write about “where we are (exactly), details about what’s going on.” His immediate boss knows about the blog but hasn’t seen it, he says. “He trusts me not to do anything stupid,” Lt. Cmdr. Mickey says.

It’s not hard to run this kind of Web site from the front. The armed services don’t have centralized rules governing troops’ Internet use, beyond restricting such obvious things as pornography and disclosure of military operational details. Each branch of the military has its own set of general guidelines, but typically delegates decisions about e-mail and Internet access to commanders in the field. There, soldiers can use the military’s nonofficial network, the Nonsecure Internet Protocol Network, or Nippernet. Enlisted troops often have access to makeshift Internet cafes in the larger camps.

Maj. C.J. Wallington, team leader for the Army’s secure intranet system, Army Knowledge Online, says because of the volume, the Army “can’t spend a lot of time” checking soldiers’ e-mail. “We put a lot of faith in soldiers to do the right thing,” and apply the same discretion to their Internet communications that they’d use in personal conversations, he says.

Some of the blogs mentioned in the article:

The Primary Main Objective