Depends who you read, but the idea that Twitter is a potential terrorist information base is getting some people nervous. That raises a few nasty ethical problems for journalists and legislators, too. Twitter itself is looking a bit worse for wear, too.
Twitter is a very straightforward update/social net site. It’s like text, in some ways, but much better looking, and arguably a lot more efficient as a communications tool. It can take data, and it has a global reach. You can access it on a phone, so it really is useful.
Space War has a lot more info than many mainstream reports on this subject:
The report by the 304th Military Intelligence Battalion, posted on the website of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), examines a number of mobile and web technologies and their potential uses by militants.
The posting of the report on the FAS site was reported Friday by Wired magazine contributing editor Noah Shachtman on his national security blog "Danger Room" at wired.com.[
Danger Room's piece contains a lot of interesting examples of possible terrorist applications, and is well worth a look as a practical example of the real terrorist issues. Interestingly,
the FAS site, and
Google news, don't appear to have the FAS posting, at least not where I could see it.
The report is not based on clandestine reporting but drawn from open source intelligence known as OSINT.
A chapter on "Potential for Terrorist Use of Twitter" notes that Twitter members sent out messages, known as "Tweets," reporting the July Los Angeles earthquake faster than news outlets and activists at the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis used it to provide information on police movements.
"Twitter has also become a social activism tool for socialists, human rights groups, communists, vegetarians, anarchists, religious communities, atheists, political enthusiasts, hacktivists and others to communicate with each other and to send messages to broader audiences," the report said.
Hacktivists refers to politically motivated computer hackers.
"Twitter is already used by some members to post and/or support extremist ideologies and perspectives," the report said.
These are the quotes from wired.com’s Danger Room that have created the issues. Some could say that Twitter may well be more reliable than some news sources, because the information regarding the LA earthquake and the RNC in Minneapolis didn’t get a mention in some mainstream papers.
Another issue worthy of note is that this analysis has been based on what Twitter’s being used for, rather than terrorism per se. The main concern, in terms of phraseology, is apparently about social activism, whoever’s doing it. Exactly how that became a priority would be interesting to know, but there’s another problem.
The Net is very fast, and Twitter works at Net speeds. So it supercedes existing public information sources, and most security services, unless they decide to monitor Twitter, which is probably already the case.
That means that Twitter is now a battleground, at least in theory.
This is where the ethical question arises:
If you’re using Twitter, who are you telling what? Obviously, the military report didn’t have much trouble finding out.
Are you, or your sources safe?
Are you risking somebody else’s safety?
If the military are interested in social activism, as well as terrorism, what are the chances of you fitting an observation target group?
Again, who are you telling what?
Much less amusing is this
Status page on Twitter:
The site, very responsibly, like a good net citizen, reports a series of problems currently affecting it.
In the last six days, the site has experienced Direct Message Delivery problems, pretty serious for a site based on direct messages. User search has been disabled for four days, not great when you’re trying to find other Twitter users. Real time search is also delayed. The
Twitter blog page is over a week old. Not exactly in character for the fastest service on the net.
Interesting set of problems, all occurring since this report was published.
In more rational times, like non-election years when the nutcases are dormant, one might assume technical glitches, server problems, or just plain ‘ol network issues.
The very broad extent of this study and its evident internal US socio political tone indicates that a bit of non-conspiratorial, but healthy, paranoia, might be justified.
There’s no way of figuring the logic, but Twitter seems to be on the receiving end of some very negative press.
There’s been no mention of Twitter’s right to operate, and the rights of communication.
The military study is stating some of the obvious, but none of the statutory, considerations. If bugging a phone, or surveillance of a citizen requires legal processes, what about Twitter and its users?
Lawsuits, anyone?
