I guess we all need to be re-reminded about how your blogging indiscretions can land you on the unemployment line. Even when you’re blogging from within the bowels of the Central Intelligence Agency, on the CIA’s private intranet:

[Software contractor Christine] Axsmith, 42, said in an interview this week that she thinks of herself as the Erma Bombeck of the intel world, a “generalist” writing about lunch meat one day, the war on terrorism the next. She said she first posted her classified blog in May and no one said a thing. When she asked, managers even agreed to give her the statistics on how many people were entering the site. Her column on food pulled in 890 readers, and people sent her reviews from other intelligence agency canteens.

The day of the last post, Axsmith said, after reading a newspaper report that the CIA would join the rest of the U.S. government in according Geneva Conventions rights to prisoners, she posted her views on the subject…

She said BAE officials told her that the blog implied a specific knowledge of interrogations and that it worried “the seventh floor” at CIA, where the offices of the director and his management team are.

I guess some folks become so enamoured of the popular concept of a blog being more genre than format — a common mistake — that they take that as carte blanche to scribble down anything that comes into their heads. Why someone would imagine that they they could publish opinion about such a hot-potato issue like torture under the Federal government’s aegis, and not get called on it, is baffling. You might as well start up a blog at one of the Big Tobacco companies, and then start posting lung cancer study findings…

Aside from all this, I think Axsmith has an exaggerated sense of continuing repercussions. No one’s going to come after her in the dead of night because of this; this was a simple pest-removal operation. No one on “the seventh floor” gives a rat’s ass about this self-styled Erma Bombeck, now that she’s not goofing around on their time.