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US Army Sees Twitter As Possible Terrorist "Operation Tool"
Mike writes "A draft US Army intelligence report has identified the popular micro-blogging service Twitter as a potential terrorist tool. A chapter titled 'Potential for Terrorist Use of Twitter' notes that Twitter members reported 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 is already used by some members to post and/or support extremist ideologies and perspectives,' the report said. The report goes on to say, 'Terrorists could theoretically use Twitter social networking in the US as an operation tool.' Just wait until the Army finds out about chat rooms and email!"
Go sit in the corner. If it's taken them THIS long to realize that the internet is nothing but a gigantic communications tool... geez....
Sorry, but I get tired of these messages. Terrorists could potentially use paper and pencils to communicate too. Lets outlaw that too. The hammer and the screwdriver are terrible weapons. Let us outlaw anything that has a potential. And please start with my hands because they are the most lethal of all.
Common sense; it is so rare, it is a god damn superpower.
Maybe if you define terror as "really, really irritating."
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
When computers are outlawed, only outlaws will have computers!! All this new fangled technology that old, white men don't understand needs to be banned!
I'm sure the bad guys haven't figured out how to send an SMS to several numbers on disposable phones. ~
Invenio via vel creo
Just wait until the government figures out that terrorists use the US Mail for their terrorist activities. Whatever will we do then? Won't somebody please think of the children?
If there is a method of communication, the probability of these ubiquitous "terrorists" using it for communication are pretty close to 1. File this story under "duh".
FP?
Just wait for the plan to send soldiers in to the net.
Why doesn't the military simply save itself a lot of time and wasted effort and the rest of the people a ton of tax money and just simply report that any communications system from a wink or a semaphore to encrypted satellite communications could be used by bad guys, and that anything from a rock to a rocket could be a potential weapon?
Cheers!
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
- Buying explosives. Thanks tom! :D
- Shaping explosvies.
- Milling bomb casing.
- Filling bomb casing.
- Rigging fuse. Hehe I made the + terminal blue instead of RED! That'll get'em!
- Putting bomb in suitcase. This new Ralph Lauren suitcase design is DYNOMITE!
- Getting in car. We sould really put some Al-Qaeda funds into something better than an 92 GeoMetro. This thing sucks.
- Leaving on Airplane. Phone off! ByeBye for now! Don't want to crash plane.
- Landed! The big apple awaits!
- Picked up food at McDonalds on third street. Mmmmmm McFlurry goodness.
- Bomb planted on 5th and James. They should make larger trashcans. Those things are TINY!1!
- Bored. Waiting at Starbucks. Prices are insane!
The US Army views things through a certain lens where the major thing they consider about anything is "How will terrorists use it?" The truth is, there are nefarious ways to use almost everything, even a pencil. You can't prevent bad things from happening just by thinking up how they may happen. If someone wants to badly enough, they can achieve grand things. That goes for good and bad. It takes the apathy of many people, or even someone who may charm angsty groupies, or whatever. Why spend time being afraid and worrying about what may happen? We can't possibly take preventative measures against absolutely every manner of causing harm or allowing ingress. This isn't news, it's just the army doing their... "job" I guess...
Twinstiq, game news
In chemistry, you can get funding for anything as long as you can relate it to cancer, no matter how tenuously.
"Terrorism" is the "cancer" of security folks -- magically gets them support and funding. Used to be Communism, but that is SO 20th century.
If we ever reach a state where we don't have anything to be afraid of, the security-freaks will have to invent something in order to keep their jobs. Oh, wait...
I piss off bigots.
Every tool of communication can be used to plot against the government.
It used to be that all they had to do was tap your land-line phones and read your mail. Now they have to tap your phones, fax, text messages, in-game chats, web pages, e-mail, viral videos, and the secret messages contained in your spam.
The more options of communication you have, the more chances you have to be plotting against them.
Obviously you must be stopped while they still can.
They bring new meaning to the term "Communications Tool".
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
Just wait till they discover slashdot. Not only a communications means for terrorists, it's a goddam weapon that can make entire websites grind to a halt.
They, of course, they mean anything critical of U.S. government or U.S. policy. By insurgent, they mean Democrat... It doesn't matter anyway, Democrats will win. Democrats will destroy Republicans this fall. We won. And we will keep winning. So shut your racist face.
Homeland securit bans use of all telephones. Cites device could be used for communication.
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
Our approach to finding terrorist "operational tools" seems to be almost identical to our approach to finding patentable "methods".
Everybody remember the ghastly rash of patents of the form "*yada, yada, something obvious and already common* On the Internet!"? It appears that we are going through the same thing here. Today it is Terrorism, on Twitter!, a while back it was Terrorism, on Wow!, even Terrorism, hidden in kiddie porn!(the ultimate in integrated police state rationalizations. Proposed in Britain, of course. I wish I were kidding).
Terrorism is a threat, albeit an absurdly and dangerously overhyped one; but all this stuff about "OMG TERRORISTS USING $COMMUNICATION_TOOL!" is just stupid(or aimed at laying the groundwork for controlling $COMMUNICATION_TOOL; but our Heroic and Patriotic leaders would never do that). Obviously terrorists need to communicate, obviously they'll use whatever happens to fit their needs, which probably means almost exactly the same things as any other criminal enterprise.
'Nuff said.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
As Possible Terrorist "Operation Tool" "A draft US Army intelligence report has identified the popular thinking device, a "Brain", as a potential terrorist tool. A chapter titled 'Potential for Terrorist Use of Brains' notes that brain users reported 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. Brains are already used by some members to think of and/or support extremist ideologies and perspectives,' the report said. The report goes on to say, 'Terrorists could theoretically use their brains in the US as an operation tool.'
Wisest is he who knows he does not know.
The military discovers that human speech may be used to transfer terrorist information and requests that all non authorized speech be banned.
They wont be happy until every second of everyones day is tracked, and they have a way to scan your brain daily for 'subversive thoughts'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Terrorists can use TXT messages too... and guess what... TXT messages are more secure than Twitter.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
>>>Twitter as a potential terrorist tool.
Judas Priest.
What does Twitter have to do with a 80's hair band?
So there are terrorist fanbois online now too? By definition, a terrorist is someone engaged in asymmetric warfare, i.e. one of their main advantages is stealth/secrecy, so it's hard to see how someone would be an enthusiastic promoter of it in public. "Terrorist enthusiast" is such an odd turn of phrase that almost all hits are for this article itself.
wait till they find out about GPG and TOR.... and dare I say it.... Linux.
I know he supposedly has a lot of sockpuppets, but calling Twitter a possible terrorist operation tool is a bit much, isn't it?
A joint committee between DARPA, Homeland Security, the CIA, NSA, FBI and BATF to day reported scientific findings supporting prior suspicions that neurons are a potential terrorist tool. The blue-ribbon committee recommends HLS licensing the expression of genes for BDNF as a precaution.
Seastead this.
If this story is alleging that twitter is useful for something, then I call bullshit on the whole thing.
Judas Priest was not a hair band. Either you're trolling or you were born in 1995.
Why don't you go to the playground and try what James Vance took two tries to accomplish.
/. is a terrorist haven! All you have to do is browse at -1 on all Apple/Google/Nintendo stories!
[Slashdot Comments We Liked]
That's right! And, what's worse, they have infiltrated the Slashdot moderation system! They are using Slashdot moderators to transmit their messages. Watch this:
If this post is moderated (-1, Offtopic) it means "skyjack an aircraft"
If this post is moderated (-1, Redundant) it means "bomb the Pentagon"
If this post is moderated (-1, Overrated) it means "spread anthrax over a large US city"
If this post is moderated (-1, Troll) it means "put child pornography in the internet"
If this post is moderated (-1, Flamebait) it means "send a suicide bomber to the subway"
If this post is moderated (+1, Insightful) it means "disband, they found us out"
If this post is moderated (+1, Interesting) it means "go to the FBI and tell everything about us"
If this post is moderated (+1, Informative) it means "sorry, we are wrong"
If this post is moderated (+1, Funny) it means "get a life, don't be a terrorist"
If this post is moderated (+1, Underrated) it means "terrorist? Oops, sorry, I wanted to be a theorist"
ICQ
According to our current NeoCon government: 'extremist ideologies and perspectives' == anything that criticizes our regime, or that we otherwise don't agree with.
Vote for Obama. Why? Two reasons:
P.S.: Go ahead and mod me down to -1, Troll|Flamebait|$whatever. Doesn't change my opinion OR invalidate what I'm saying, and it sure as hell doesn't make you right, bitches. At least I have the guts to make a post like this as myself and not as Anonymous Coward.
I can't place the name or even the time period, but there's a quote floating around in my head about the dangers of seeking "perfect" safety. The analogy goes something like this: you could build a perfectly safe transportation system that carried zero risk, but by the time you were done building it, you couldn't afford the fuel to go where you wanted.
The exploitation of paranoia in our society has led us to spending over 5 trillion dollars on military and wartime budgets since 9/11. Are we any safer? The answer is, no; even the most hard line hawk must admit that there is no way to protect America from all future terrorist attacks. Even if it's preventing terrorist attacks now, it's only delaying them. Instead of a gang of Saudis, next time it will be a gang of Iraqis, pissed off for the same reason: infidel influence in their home country. So, we can continue meddling in Arab affairs -- you can see how well that has gone -- or we can remove our resources from the middle east, spend them on complete energy independence, and continue our far more effective foreign intelligence services. And then we could do something amazing: actually listen to what they are saying.
The best litmus test for me is to take press releases and news items from my own government, and imagine it was instead a Soviet-era communique from the state news agency. If it even passes the laugh test, I give it some thought, but most of the time, the thought experiment reveals the propaganda for what it is: completely transparent bullshit.
OMG, Onoez, Sunday -- A report by the US Army 304th Military Intelligence Battalion identifies Internet technologies such as Twitter as potential TERRORIST tools.
Twitter users reported the July Los Angeles earthquake faster than news outlets, and TERRORISTS protesting at the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis used it to provide information on police movements.
Other technologies were also examined for their TERRORIST uses. "Email could be used for TERRORIST messages, the anonymous troll comments on Slashdot could be used for TERRORIST data exchange and GPS trackers could be used to find our asses. We are also examining the dangers of YouTube pratfall videos, cat macros and pencils and paper.
"There is terrible, terrible danger that if people can communicate they may say something TERRORIST," said the report. "As such, our forces have secured the offices of Twitter and its financial backers are awaiting trial for funding TERRORIâ""
The report cut off at this point, replaced with a Fail Whale.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Surely this list is an enumeration of ALL communication possibilities? Twitter has communication possibility, therefore deserves to be on the list amongst:
* Smoke signals
* Pigeon Carriers
* Coded Letters
* Invisible Ink Letters
* Text Messages
* Mobile Phone Calls
* Emails
* Slashdot posts
* Twitter
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
We finally have an excuse to ban Twitter and send him and his sockpuppets to Gitmo!
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Is it possible to use Twitter for the stated purpose? yes.
Is it possible to use GPS as well (as also mentioned in the article)? yes.
Is it possible to use a steel-toed shoe for nefarious ends? yes.
Intelligence services have to identify all possible sources of intel first before they can start gathering info from them. They are hardly fools for stating the obvious (scientists do it all the time). If you have a problem with how much they gather, that we can talk about. But getting upset because they say that Twitter is a place they should be looking? Give me a break.
While I am glad that our armed services evaluate all threat pathways (even obvious ones), I am offended when our officers try to impact a political agenda, as was done in this case.
This is an obvious attempt to pander to fear to increase military appropriations or otherwise alter civilian behavior. The officers in question here should have made their report to their commanders. The commanders could then refer their report to their civilian superiors. The civilian superiors ought then make all decisions about disclosure.
This is simply military involvement in the politics of speech--and it is entirely unwarranted. Military officers must stay out of politics.
Last time I checked combating terrorism in the US is not their fuckin' job. That's what Law Enforcement does. I think posting few of their guardsmen at the airports went a bit to their heads.
You guys had better get cracking; this is a lot of stuff to ban! Them terr'rists are out to git us, and Wal-Mart, Target, Office Depot, Radio Shack, and other seemingly American stores are helping them out!!
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
Reading between the lines, its not Twitter as a terrorist operations tool, but rather, Twitter as a method to dispersing information faster than government sanctioned sources.
This being said, when the hell did the country of liberty and freedom become such a fk-ing police state?
Honestly. All this is is a single expression of the huge networking of computers we call "The Internet". Even if they found a bizarre way to shut down Twitter, confiscate the servers, etc, there is nothing that cannot prevent a competing service from filling the role. After awhile, it leaves only one option.
Go home. Internet's closed.
..US intel agencies have prepared another draft document that identifies other potential terrorist tools
Shovels-they can be used to plant bombs
Wheelbarrows-transport the bombs
sneakers-terrorists could be using sneakers on their feet to make it easy to walk around on the ground
clothing-terrorists could be wearing clothing so they could "blend in" with the civilian population and sneak around
talking to people-terrorists could infiltrate and meet each other and "talk"-communicate-with other terrorists
cars-terrorists, having blended into the civilian population, might use "cars" as transportation so they can go meet other terrorists and "talk"
grocery stores-terrorists might make use of grocery stores as part of a long supply train in order to get "food" for themselves and other terrorists in their secret underground cells
public drinking fountains-water is a necessity for terrorist operations, so they might make use of public drinking fountains and garner unauthorized water supplies
money-terrorists could make use of cash money in order to purchase supplies that they could use for terrorist operations, such as sneakers, clothing, shovels, wheelbarrows, food, etc
pencils and paper-terrorists might make use of easily available pencils and paper on the rogue "underground" black market, and use these devices as a communications medium. The report also suggests closing the "department store loophole" in order to combat this threat
videogames-terrorists might make use of videogames as a cheap way to get assymetrical warfare training, and to indoctrinate and brainwash their cadre into risking armed violent attacks by portraying it as "normal" and something that the civilian population would support. Some notice has been made by "deep cover" agents that the game "America's Army" apparently is a favorite with terrorists
sporting events=sporting events have been identified as a favorite terrorist meeting area, where they can get together and "talk"-or communicate- and engage in psychological "pumping up" efforts in order to bolster courage before going out on terrorism operations. Long range surveillance has noted that they "Chant" various phrases like "Kill 'em!" and "De-fense! De-fense!" and will also engage in ritualistic "hooting" which appears to be a secret call sign that identifies terrorists to their appropriate cell members. Different cells have different names, and the chants change to identify them.
It has been noted that some terrorists are male, and some are female, and they can come in all ages, so the modern warfighter has to take note when they see individuals or groups that are made up of males or females or combinations of such.
All terrorists were once little kids. Therefore, we should ban little kids. There, Problem solves once and for all.
Government agencies said the TTL (Tweet Threat Level or Time To Live) rose to an unprecedented, red-zone high today when members of a fringe terrorist organization all were doing their laundry and tweeting at the same time about how bored they were. News at 11!
Hopefully military intelligence will come to realize how powerful a tool Twitter can be.
Having, at one time, subscribed to various peoples' Twitter posts... forcing a Gitmo detainee to read Twitter feeds for a few hours will certainly force them into a more compliant state. They'll tell us anything they know just to get away from it.
#DeleteChrome
I was fine with the synopsis up until this line: "Just wait until the Army finds out about chat rooms and email!". Seriously- who added the commentary? Folks at /.? The submitter? The Admin?
Believe it or not, there are individuals that exist only to inflict pain on someone else. The job of the military is to prevent that. Most of the posts here are railing *against* a military that has, by popular doctrine and re-election, done what it has been instructed to do.
Now there are also government agencies that exist to evaluate threats and to think up ways of protecting your average American citizen. It takes some of the best and the brightest- even those that DO NOT WANT THIS WAR- and instructs them to come up with ways that someone may abuse a new technology to cause harm. They do so. And it turns out there is a tool that could be exploited, in real time, via phone, to bring pain and suffering to individuals.
Why bash them for this? My god don't you believe they'd rather hope for the best in people? You mock them for doing their duty to keep the country safe.
Seems to me (these days) that the US Army is a potential terrorist tool....
We all know the guy's been annoying everyone on Slashdot, but a "terrorist operation tool"? That's waay overreacting. He just hates Microsoft, that all.
boobs are a myth!
I understand the -1 mod on the parent, but redundant? Off topic or troll I would understand but this is as if geeks already know that "tits are a myth" and as such the information is nothing new.
I'm sad to be a member of this community =)
Okay, let's settle this one right now.
Coded Porn!
Infiltrate the holes in the spread legs of the subject. Move in and out smoothly and competently while keeping the subject at ease and pliant.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I cut large letters into my backyard lawn spelling out a message.
Sometime later the satellites take a photo of it and include it in Google Earth.
Only my evil co-conspirators know where to go to look for it.
Hahahahahahaahaahaaaaaa!
And maybe smoke signals if we need more bandwidth and less latency in our "chatter".
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
But if anyone was looking for another reason why the military shouldn't be involved in law enforcement and domestic intelligence gathering, this would be a good one to add to the list.
The military shouldn't be a precision tool of foreign policy or engaged in law enforcement or peace keeping. Their job is to break things and kill people. Intelligence gathering by the military should be limited to supporting that core mission. Anything else is up to the CIA and NSA. That's why we have them.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Well, at least they know
The terrorists win.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
yep. get them to pass the law so we can kick theirs and call it civic duty.
As you say, Marx was an idiot - but if you look at him and most "Marxists" of various sorts who follow him, they were really verbose idiots. Sure, Engels got him to fit the Communist Manifesto in a short, punchy document with memorable slogans, but Das Kapital or the Unabomber's 35000-word manifesto were more typical. And most of the Islamic extremists are really verbose as well. Twitter and text messages are simply the wrong medium for ideological extremists to use.
Twitter may be fine for tactical operational messages or for non-ideologicals like gangs - "Lets go kill the Haitians!" fits just fine. Marxists can at least use Twitter to say "Let's go get beer"; even that doesn't work for the Islamics.
Maybe the white-power hate groups could fit their ideology into short messages, if they can type that well, but they're the FBI's problem, not the Army's. And even they'd mostly use it for things like "Goin to Wa||mrt - white sheets are on sale".
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
quick Slashdot admins hand over the logs they might take him out for good before they realize the report was about the other annoying twitter.
We can dream.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
Paper can be used to spread extremist ideals in the form of bundles put into casings. They call this instrument 'book'. potentially a very dangerous apparatus, its implementations are practically unlimited ...
Read radical news here
Your balls are registered with the local police department?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Thank goodness the FAS is help cause of global terror, we never thought of that... :
Down with the infidels of the Twitterverse, down with the cloud, down with...this is boring.
PS: Notice the Anonymous Coward posting - should you be scared?
Perhaps they could be threats, but I don't think they're going to try and limit American use of Tweets. I think they're just going to do what we always do, and that's learn what we can, and react. The trouble is that we're always one step behind. We still let the people of Iraq use cell phones and digital cameras, even though we know these things are the most common tools for IED makers/payees.
The value lost by the economy as a whole has been great, but you don't think an American produced electric automobile industry would have helped at all? Or the effect of fully backed government programs to keep people employed with infrastructure improvements during the economic downturn?
Just a decrease of 20% in oil usage could have saved over a trillion, not counting the likelihood of lower oil prices due to decreased demand. And the war spending has been trillions, not billions. It's low historically, but only if you ignore discretionary spending and sections of the Dept of Energy developing nuclear weapons.
Coincidentally, the same administration responsible for liberating the credit derivatives market, which postponed the internet bubble, are the same ones spending money we don't have on projects that have ZERO return on investment. Once you explode a million dollar piece of ordnance, it pays with a different kind of interest twenty years down the road.
instead of having the reds to fear, we can be afraid of something that doesn't even have a color
and activists at the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis used it to provide information on police movements
It'd help if you didn't have a convention that didn't have a proven history of overzealous law enforcement. Especially if it's with accredited journalists that didn't have the blessing of being from The Far Right's Blessed Voice, Fox.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Have you even tried to read Marx's Capital? The simple fact that you put it in the same sentence as the Unabomber manifesto shows clearly that you have not...
That you are judging the guy's analysis of the role of capital in the economy based on the actions of people who used his name, quite a few decades after he was dead, and in ways that would have make him puke, is pretty minor in comparison to your being writing about a work you have no knowledge of.
The US Military is itself seen by many as a State Based Terrorist Tool that uses overwhelming military power to crush it's enemies and inflict countless murderous deaths against innocent bystanders, euphemistically called "collateral damage".
It's amazing that one State Based Terrorist Organization will be so afraid of others.
Look in the mirror and see the horror that has been inflicted around the world by the USA.
I don't support Terrorism whether it's by individuals or by individuals within groups or sponsored by State Based Organizations with an agenda. It's all the same: death and murder.
As Einstein said, we need to think differently at a new level to solve the problems created at the current level of thinking. Blowing people up might stop them but others get in line and the cycle repeats itself and expands...
How to stop it? What can you do to stop it? Revoke your governments power to wage war? What else?
the power of twitter, that is also the power of email, SMS broadcasts, and at least 900,000,000 different ways of communicating via the internet is that agents can all report information in short bursts.
A1: blues are heading west.
A2: greens are heading east. left 3 guards.
A3: target only has 6 guards. places everyone.
A1: in position.
A2: in position.
A3: It is 3:21 right now. Go at 4:10.
Now, this would be outright RETARTED to do this via twitter. Get some used Ham radio handhelds on ebay and use the local repeater for your agents during the event. If you use one of the oddball repeaters like the 1.2ghz or the 220 repeaters no hams would even know anything was going on until it was too late. Most of those repeaters dont even have hams listening 98% of the time and if you comms are very short you're golden. If you're well funded drop a repeater on a hill (that you also bought off ebay) and set up your own system.
It will take at least days hours before anyone reports all the "dirka dirka jihad" talk on some obscure frequency. The feds will probably never detect it, and all the gear is readily available.
Why even waste time with a toy like twitter?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
This just in, the US Army Sees the Human Mouth As Possible Terrorist "Operation Tool".
You don't need to know what you're talking about to be 'interesting', all you need to do is tell people what they want to believe. Stupidity + slashdot = stupidity in a positive feedback loop.
- Shoelaces
- Lighters
- Sharp pencils
- Duct tape
the US Army sees ANYTHING as possible Terrorist "Operation Tool" and EVERYONE as possible Terrorist...
how is this news?
my suggestion:
http://games.rapidshare.com/games/2008/06/ednabrichtaus/img/screens/full_size/1.jpg
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
So, you're telling me Leo Laporte is a terrorist? Well, I have just one thing to say then... I reject your reality and substitute my own.
. . . and where can I buy some?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I believe the only point the GP was trying to make when mentioning Das Kapital and the Unabomber manifesto is that both works are very long and wordy - no more, no less.
This comment is for entertainment purposes only. Any similarity to real insight or information is purely coincidental.
Words, Pictures, AND VIDEO can travel through the INTERPIPES?! We need tighter goverment control over the Interpipes Spiggots, to cut off the flow of unapproved megabites and megahurtz. Get the feeling that goverment gets their technology "know-how" from cheesy movies like http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/07/16/ ?
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
Terrorists
With
Information
Technology
Tools
Extend
Reach
i guess the US Army only have to worry about the terrorists whose plans can be described in 140 characters or less!
Military people don't civilian technology unless they feel they are surveying or doing some type of military endeavor with it. Now they have an excuse to read twitter messages of other people and not look like a b*tch in front of their peers.
For petes sake. Any communications media can be a "terrorist tool".
Perhaps they should shoot all pigeons cause they can carry messages.
Hmmm what about those evil grandmothers that send cookies, they could be hiding terrorist messages...
and make sure to kill all goats in case someone ties a message to their balls. .....
*sigh*
Ward
. Silence! Be thankful thy species is unpalatable! .
According to marketing, the competition will always be full of "criminals" and "terrorists".
First Napster, then Linux/Slashdot, then Youtube, then Myspace, and now Twitter...
So far, it has not been an effective message. But the aim is always to drive folks away from the competitor.
And the real source of the message always seems to be anonymized.
The US Army may see Twitter as possible abusable tools, but i'm sure they see cell phones the same way.
The real question is: Who is behind popularizing "twitter" above others as possible to be used by Terrywrists?
It's not Slashdot... Slashdot's just repeating it. I don't think it's Breitbart...
I would have to wonder about the FAS, and I would have to wonder about what individual compiled the report.
Have you ever tried to read the Unabomber manifesto?
I'd say that both Marx and Kaczynski were spot on in their analyses of the problems in their respective societies, but misguided in their approaches to change them.
What a joke, the army is just figuring out that the Internet is a mass communication tool that can be used by anyone? This is what geniuses at the U.S. Army intelligence are spending their time and our tax dollars on? Knowing this does not make me confident in their abilities to protect our nation. I just think they are trying to find another excuse to use internet tracking to spy on the lives of American citizens.
Two options.
A) The idiots in the Army are incompetent and really haven't thought this through as well as you have. They're just blowing enough sunshine up their superior's rear ends to get another promotion. This happens with quite a bit of frequency no matter where you're employed.
B) The guys in the Army are much smarter than we give them credit for and they're just using this to scare people into further believing in some vague terrorist threat and we need to further monitor all communication platforms for said threat. Then they can find the "real" terrorists like Hippys, Liberals, Ron Paul drones and other "Anti-American" types. Not that twitter is a decent communications platform for anything other than 144 character introspective, self-indulgent bullshit.
Good. Cheap. Fast. Pick Two.
Yeah and any other form of communication.
Chill out.
GC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
I don't think anyone is stupid enough to have missed that the internet is a gigantic communication tool (for more than just porn).
Wha? There's more than just porn???
No, gp is just confused... to these military types, all this terrorist talk IS pr0n.
tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
...Blogger cofounder Evan Williams, who owns Twitter's parent company, Obvious.
@dom nice work on obama/iphone!
Anyone else want to be there when the "Discover" PGP. I think they have many more important things to worry about.
Have you ever tried to read the Unabomber manifesto?
Actually yes. That's why I can say with a lot of confidence that it does not make any sense to associate it with the Capital.
I'd say that both Marx and Kaczynski were spot on in their analyses of the problems in their respective societies, but misguided in their approaches to change them.
Das Kapital is an analysis on political economy. While Marx surely did write about his approach to political change elsewhere, it is not in Das Kapital that he did that. That's pretty apparent from the first few pages...
Bloggers, microbloggers, virtually instant worldwide information distribution - an information processing hive. Be part of the hive, or figure out how to leverage it.
They were right - the revolution did not get televised. It was posted on YouTube instead. All in 120 characters. SLOOSH!
Are those the same people who came up with the ...... idea that a bottle of water could be used to perform a terror attack? (If you open a bottle of water onboard an airplane, the oxygen and hydrogen is going to react and cause a huge explosion, or something).
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
Technology: US Army Sees Telephone As Possible Terrorist "Operation Tool"
Mike writes:
"A draft US Army intelligence report has identified the popular communication device, the telphone, as a potential terrorist tool. A chapter titled 'Potential for Terrorist Use of Phones' notes that telephoned loved-ones knew of the July Los Angeles earthquake faster than lonely tv-watchers, and activists at the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis used mobile phones to keep the police honest. 'Phones are already used by some godless freedom-haters to discuss and/or debate extremist ideologies and perspectives,' the report said. The report goes on to say, 'Terrorists could theoretically use telephones in the US as an operation tool.' Just wait until the Army finds out pen and paper!"
Murdoch is too busy using Zondervan to fight God's KJV AV 1611 Christians, so he has begun a starter program through PayPal that subsidized entertainment on condition that people enter local medical stations to remove the offending IP. Amateur/Ham Radio operators are outraged, and are astroturfing ARRL and FCC for selling the questionable IP to Vivendi; they will continue using morse-code to talk about their radio equipment and its many uses of their radio equipment to document their further search to buy and dispose of radio equipment that lets them further talk about their radio equipment-buying and selling needs.
You can log on to Twitter with an anonymous account from a cyber cafe and post a message like 'drinking coffee with friends'. This is a pre-arranged code. Someone else can look at your Twitter feed in another cyber cafe, without creating an account anywhere.
You have just exchanged a message in a way that is basically untraceable. There are lots of other ways of doing this via the Internet, but Twitter is nice and easy to use. You can even send the message from a mobile phone. It doesn't matter that they have records of who owns the phone, since there's nothing to connect you to the person reading your feed from a different IP every day.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
So perhaps the media is using sensationalism to obtain their equivalent of "page hits", and it is successful because the audience is still having knee-jerk reactions to it? If so, the divide between those who were not alive or old enough to conceive of the 9/11 attacks will cause them to question our reactions to stories such as these, and perhaps think we are overreacting. That places a bias on the next generation that may counteract our own reactions and cause healthy debate, provided we see each other as equals, however our age will probably be the only difference between us, which will cause the next generation to perpetuate the divide between "age groups".
Why do people post this crap?
"A draft US Army intelligence report has identified the popular micro-blogging service Slashdot as a potential terrorist tool"
Now we will need new tag, something like "Terrorist Information" or "Extremist".
My Windows is NOT slow, it's special!
C) The guys in the Army were told to do a study on the possible uses of Twitter and reported what is could genuinely be used for. Unless you're saying that the intel report is somehow wrong?
There are only moobs
Looking around my basement, I think I'd qualify for having Weapons of Mass Computing.
Time to scale things back to a 486DX running Slackware 3.3... *sigh*
You can log on to Twitter with an anonymous account from a cyber cafe and post a message like 'drinking coffee with friends'. This is a pre-arranged code. Someone else can look at your Twitter feed in another cyber cafe, without creating an account anywhere.
You can log on to blogger/wordpress/tumblr/myspace/slashdot from a cyber cafe and post a message like 'today i'm going to be drinking coffee with friends at 12:30 at Cafe Weiss Haus'. This is a pre-arranged code. Someone else can look ad your blogger/wordpress/tumblr/myspace feed in another cyber cafe, without creating an account anywhere.
To suggest Twitter is unique (& somehow dangerous) because of its ease of use is a fallacy. Those whose job is to prevent terrorist acts should not be foiling plots at stage where the "go signal" is being given.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
And the modern-day witch hunt continues..
normally, the job of an army is to fight and kill ppl from other armies. for a lack of those, the army has chosen to fight and kill civilians.
nevermind, declaring women and kids to be the evil freedom fighters certainly makes the army the right thing to handle these terrorists.
they _did_ use twitter, didnt they ?
Officially, the Pentagon has requested and received 3.2 trillion dollars worth of funding, from 2001-2008. You can look at any official federal budget.
This does not include discretionary funds for the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars or nuclear weapons development. When you add in the interest we pay to borrow money to sink into war (as it's portion of the budget deficit), the figure is even higher.
Most of the assets you speak of have been gained in wars deemed illegal by international law. In truth, they're supposed to belong to the people indigenous to that country. That opinion, however, is not held by many Americans, since we are holding the rifles, and not in the sights of someone else.
If America spent what the rest of the world does per capita, it would be less than 200 billion per year, including wars. Why are we spending five times that? Because it is very difficult, very costly, and very dangerous to rule the world with threats of violence and war.
Have you ever tried to read Marx's "Paris Commune"?
Marx had a lot of problems with the next generation of Communists while he was alive--but don't think for a second that Marx was opposed to brutality, oppression, and murder. Far from it. Force, for Marx, was a tool to satisfy the proletarian revolution. No surprise that they turned out to be selfish and bad people. Marxism itself is selfish and bad.
Furthermore, Marx's economics are about as silly to the economist as squaring the circle is to a mathematician.
I know this is slashdot and all, but seriously... wtf is the matter with all these moronic posters here talking about "paranoia" and how stupid the army is that they don't "get" the Internet.
First of fscking all, the army knows what the Internet is good for, considering they're basically the ones who had the thing built for the very purposes we all use it for today (well, maybe not porn and shopping). Of course they are aware of its utility as a communications tool!
Second, the only paranoia here is emanating from you poor bastards who are worried that Twitter is gonna get banned. The army isn't paranoid that Twitter might be used by terrorists. They're pointing out the fact that its real-time broadcast ability makes it a really useful information dissemination tool. Hence the examples about how quickly it was used to inform about the earthquake, and its effectiveness at broadcasting police movements.
All this report is saying is that Twitter may become some terrorists' communications medium of choice. No talk of banning it. Nothing said about all Twitter users being terrorists or anarchists. This was just an intelligence report pointing out that maybe Twitter is something they should expect the enemy to be using for conducting operations. That's all. Not surprising. Not unreasonable. Not paranoid.
Despite what EULAs say, most software is sold, not licensed.
Furthermore, Marx's economics are about as silly to my pet economists as squaring the circle is to a mathematician.
Fixed that for you.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
This is just an advertising campaign for getting terrorists to use this twitter tool so that US government can efficiently spy on them! Don't fall for it!
In related news pencil and paper have been found having potential for terrorist use
Slightly OT, I know, but just wait until these geniuses get a load of 4chan lulz.
Seriously, what that fuck kind of worthless information is this? Text messaging is a pretty effective as a medium for terrorists for much the same reason. Or ham radio. Or cell phones. All of these can provide quick, (mostly) anonymous communication in realtime. BFD. Saying Twitter could be used as a terrorist tool is like saying the sky is blue, the grass is green, and the sun will blind you if you stare at it too long. Thanks for the news flash, fellas. Somewhere right now, a little old grandma is scared to death of Twitter for no good reason. Hmmm....
And by the way, I don't know if anyone else feels the same way, but I have no idea what the definition of terrorist is anymore. The term is bandied around to blanket such an array of topics, that I feel it has lost its meaning akin to calling every person you know as "human" as opposed to calling them by their names.
The obviousness of the article's main point aside, I want these jokers to clearly define what they mean by 'terrorist'. There is a very big difference between 'Anti-American' and 'Anti-American-Government', for example.
Come to think of it, it kinda makes me wonder who we are fighting in the "War On Terror". Hmmmm...
What could possibly hurt the security of the American people more than giving our own government the ability to hide its
Have you ever tried to read Marx's "Paris Commune"?
I have not tried. I have read it.
Marx had a lot of problems with the next generation of Communists while he was alive--but don't think for a second that Marx was opposed to brutality, oppression, and murder. Far from it. Force, for Marx, was a tool to satisfy the proletarian revolution. No surprise that they turned out to be selfish and bad people. Marxism itself is selfish and bad.
You make it sound like he was an extraordinarily original person for not opposing force, and for thinking force to be a tool to implement his plans (which are not layed out in The Capital, which---as I have already said---is simply a political economics treatise).
I cannot but smile at the fact that you seem to believe being selfish and "bad people" is somehow characteristic of marxism! For one thing, neither personality trait is in the least correlated to a particular theory of the role of capital in the economic system. By those standards, the CEO of Lehman brothers should be elected Marxist Pope.
Furthermore, Marx's economics are about as silly to the economist as squaring the circle is to a mathematician.
I am a mathematician, and I do not find the attempts at squaring the circle that took place before it was proved it was impossible silly at all. Those that came afterwards, on the other hand, I find mostly silly.
I doubt a honest and knowledgeable economist finds Marx's economics silly. Of course, it is already quite a non trivial task to find one to check...
wait till the USA military figures out the human brain is the deadliest tool of all, not only can it be used to communicate, but to build weapons of mass distraction and otherwise.
h'mm maybe they already do, this would explain GWB, it is obvious now they determined a brain is a threat that terrorist could use against GWB so they removed it, now if we can tell they did it before or after he took office.
I can't really blame a bureaucratic organization like the U.S. Army for having to state the obvious, but how on earth did this get on to Slashdot? Does the story-filter take a break on the weekends?
=\/\/= If it's too loud, turn it down.
A terrorist can use it to blind their attackers! Outlaw all dirt! Now we know who the real TOOLS are after 8 years of 'W'.
My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my Father! Prepare to die!
If you use one of the oddball repeaters like the 1.2ghz or the 220 repeaters no hams would even know anything was going on until it was too late. Most of those repeaters dont even have hams listening 98% of the time and if you comms are very short you're golden.
The problem is that with the amount of repeater abuse these days, most radio amateurs *are* monitoring the repeaters they are responsible for constantly. I don't even have particularly clever kit, but I can DF someone abusing the repeater within about a minute. You'd only need to give two messages like the ones above before we'd have you...
After decades of research, the US Army has unfortunately learned that if you allow people to communicate, they might use this to plan terror.
This comes as a complete shock, and they're now looking into means of shutting down all forms of communication altogether.
Coded Porn!
Actually - has anyone ever tried to decode the pixelisation that is applied (so I'm told) to Japanese pictures? I reckon that information has been flowing right under our noses the whole time.
Get your own free personal location tracker
The side of a square which is equal in area to a circle with a radius of 1 is sqrt(pi). I've once had double entry bookkeeping explained to me, so I guess that makes me an economist ;).
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
If this post is moderated (+1, Insightful) it means "disband, they found us out"
I'd run before those black suits are at your frontdoor .. They have found you 5 times!
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
>Now, this would be outright RETARTED
The word you were looking for is "retarded", not "retarted". Unless, of course, you were speaking of tarting again.
HTH. HAND.
Why even waste time with a toy like twitter?
Global scale connectivity and synchronization?
but it is also hugely stupid. This is why "Military Intelligence" is considered an oxymoron.
Flags can be used by terrorists to organise widely spaced attacks. Pencil lasers can be used without a chance of interception unless you already know everything. Smoke signals mean that fires can be used as a terrorist communication medium for OTH organisation.
Those cheap radio sets? Terrorist tool.
Pencils, papers, vocal cords, trumpets and bongos. All terrorist tools of communication.
Potentially.
So why point this one out?
Stupid.
air force cyber command getting lots of taxpayer money, decides "we need money too." Twitter seen as "grave threat to patrotastic america freedom"
that about sum it up?
Good people go to bed earlier.
MrHanky, you win the truth prize for the day.
You are welcome on my lawn.
But the parent, to whom you are responding, does not mention Das Kapital. He simply says that he believes "..both Marx and Kaczynski were spot on in their analysis..."
Further, you can associate the Unabomber's manifesto with Das Kapital in this sense: They are both documents that most Americans have not read and yet have strong opinions about.
For example when this weekend I heard that charm school country bumpkin Sarah Palin remark that Barack Obama was "going to bring Communism" to America, I really wanted to put my size 11 Sketcher (right foot) up her behind.
You are welcome on my lawn.
So Dick Cheney's a Marxist?
Who knew?
Seriously, isn't it interesting then that neoconservativism's founders were all former Marxists?
You are welcome on my lawn.
You had to go and make sense and spoil our "24" fantasy of masterminding a turrist plot from our basement WebTV setup.
Damn you, dakameleon
You are welcome on my lawn.
I know how to use flag codes...
Just sayin'.
You are welcome on my lawn.
But "boobs" ARE redundant. If one fails you can just switch to the other active one.
Okay, so twitter may be potentially used by terrorists.
But why focus on potential, when you have actual terrorist tools:
I think the solution to terrorism is pretty obvious: We'll all have to give up our cars, telephones, mail, credit, and cash, and go back to living 1850's style.
Or, we could just learn to deal with the fact that the world is a dangerous place, and that no matter what political position we take, some people are going to hate us for it...
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
The US intelligence community and the enforcement agencies that act on its findings scare me a hell of a lot more than the "terrorists".
If a terrorist rules by fear, and the US government is trying to keep me scared all the time, doesn't that make the US government a terrorist cabal?
when there are millions of tiny little sites that no government agency has ever heard of or looked at. I'm sure everyone here can name 5 off the top of their heads.
Why wouldn't one little terrorist cell open a 1.99 a month "unlimited" account with some no name host. nah, why wouldn't that cell create a hosting provider who owns and operates it's own server and do whatever the hell they want with no one to ever know anything.
Hell, they could even have real customers and make some money on it, while hiding the data for any packet inspection that might be laying around the data center.
All this talk of Twitter and he(she?) is no where to be found. Maybe I need to update my sock puppet list.
So if it's a terrorist tool...
Terrorism is all relative by the way.
All I can say is... http://www.twitter.com/osamabinladen
I saw street corners on my way to work today where terrorists could potentially stand on sidewalks near enough to each other to engage in a conversation! Horrors!
...a strategically placed bowl of alphabet soup or SpagettiO's could also be used as a terrorist communication tool but I don't go around holding press conferences about it.
Which leaves me wondering...what brand shoe do you wear on your left foot?
lynx -dump 'http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=081025182242.js2g2op8&show_article=1' | \
sed 's/Twitter/Google/g; s/Tweets/messages/g;'
Now isn't that better? Of course, you could substitute just about any other messaging technology, from pagers to cell phones to SMS to Android, etc.....
I regularly listen to a podcast that calls for the end of the United States Federal government. Am I a terrorist? Or is the host of the show a terrorist? Were the anti-federalists terrorists?
Part of the Second American Revolution!
just sitting here, drinking my coffee...B
.
- aqk
F U
Or a single e-mail address posted to a mailing list; for bonus points, a relevant, on-topic message with a few letters accidently rearranged, or a code word slipped in.
The minute the USA realizes that the world is not out to get them they will have a lot of money not spent on security and conspiracy theories to spent somewhere else... and the thinking could destroy the american society... so better invent the enemy... "Terrorists" can use from mobile phones to any forum or web page to communicate... You can spent time and funding reporting that to superiors I guess too... Your time to waste, not my money wasted though...
I always knew twitter himself was a sock puppet. Ditto for tool.
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
Yes, I've read it, a few decades ago. (Ok, more precisely I've read "Capital", I forget whose translation, because my German wasn't quite up to reading the original "Das Kapital", but the problems were the logic, not the translation. I think my German copy was Roman-type rather than Fraktur.) That's why I was specifically insulting it, in contrast to the Communist Manifesto which has problems but is really kick-ass writing. If the phrase "tried to read it" applies, though I'm pretty sure I did finish it, it's because it was laughably bad, and maybe I wasn't giving it the respect that such a seriously intended work hoped to achieve. Now that I've got the perspective of a couple more decades of looking at real economics and not just theoretical economics, it might be interesting to re-read it. Some of his insights into capitalists' needs to expand markets weren't totally stupid, but the whole Labor Theory of Value that was the foundation of the document is simply wrong.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I'd been saying a bit more than that, but that's the core idea - if you remember the 60s and 70s, Marxists especially tended to like long wordy rambling documents where they can enjoy the sounds of their own voices/pens/typewriters, and the works produced by committees make sure that everybody gets to put in their own wrinkles on it, and that kind of extremism simply isn't made to fit into Twitter messages or SMS or even IM.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Actually that gets to my dimly-remembered critique of the Labor Theory of Value that underlies Marx's belief that capitalists are evilly exploiting workers. Marx gives an example of shoes made by hand by workers and shoes made using capitalist-provided machines, and argues that the hand-made shoes are more valuable because more labor went into them, because all the value comes from the labor. (I think he argues that the value of the raw material doesn't count, because its value also depends on the labor from raising the cows, tanning the leather, etc.)
But the value of a pair of shoes to the wearer doesn't depend on the amount of work that went into making it, and while there may be quality differences between hand-made shoes and shoes that were made using machines, that can be positive or negative. And while it takes just as much labor to make two left shoes as it does to make a right shoe and a left shoe, the value to the wearer is substantially different.
Now, in America, the value of that shoe is derived from the brand name, with Sketchers being intermediate between Nikes and Keds, as opposed to the issue of whether your size is really 11 or 10.6 or 11.2 and medium-width as opposed to wide or narrow with the laces tightened enough to adjust for the wrong fit. After all, they all come from the same sweatshops...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks