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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!"
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.
A hypothesis would be that they are trying to implement hooks to restrict 'free speech', the latter being a potential 'operation tool' for 'terrorists'.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
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.
I imagine they are discussing those so-called "domestic terrorists" who believe such wacky ideas like "Don't Tread on Me", or that the Constitution is the Supreme Law, or that Human Rights are inalienable, or that juries have the power to nullify prosecution brought against innocent persons. ( http://www.pa-aware.org/who-are-terrorists/domestic-6.asp [pa-aware.org] )
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
It is that - just the Army doing their job. Evaluation of security implications means analysis of capabilities. Is twitter capable of being used for nefarious purposes? Of course.
If you bother to read TFA you'll see that the same analysis is being applied to several other ubiquitous technologies including GPS.
This sort of thing is very routine; nothing to see here, move along.
I don't think anyone is stupid enough to have missed that the internet is a gigantic communication tool (for more than just porn). Obviously there are people in the military bureaucracy who have never heard of Twitter, and this report is going to be their introduction. What is its purpose? To inform decision makers that it is possible to create or use tools like Twitter to broadcast information point-to-multipoint, and how this capability can be abused by terrorist groups. I am sure that there are people in the Pentagon, due to their age or lack of experience with modern web apps, who have never considered this possibility and it's probably good they are made aware.
:P ), but those people are already beyond help. Does this mean that no one in the Pentagon had ever heard of Twitter? No. Does it mean that fighting Twitter is about to become a priority for the Army? Emphatically, no. What it means is that the Army intelligence service was trying to inform the chain of command about modern applications on the internet and their potential to be used as a weapon. And guess what? That's their job. So I, for one, am glad they are doing it. With full knowledge, I might add, of the past abuses of civil rights that the US intelligence community has committed.
/.'ers this is a "no shit" idea, but to people whose lives are primarily spent off the internet it would be valuable.
Does this mean that someone is going to misinterpret this report to mean Twitter is a terrorist organization? I'm sure (would it really be so bad if it got taken down?
When I worked as a software designer for Big Company, I remember they gave me a kind of cheesy pamphlet describing a day in the life of the target customer for our product, interspersed with market information. I bet to a marketer, everything in there was a "no shit Sherlock" fact, but to me as a developer it was new and valuable information. Same with this, to
'Every story, if continued long enough, ends in death.' --Ernest Hemingway
Actually, the last one being the only effective one.
Terrorists are literally no longer terrorists if you are not afraid of them.
By that definition, US govt is more of a terrorist than an average terrorist. I'm actually more afraid of what could a government do to "try to stop the terrorists" than what terrorists themselves might do to me.