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Journalist Tricked Captors Into Twitter Access
itwbennett writes "Kosuke Tsuneoka, a Japanese freelance journalist held captive in Afghanistan since April 1, was released over the weekend. His freedom came a day after he sent two Twitter messages from a captor's phone. 'i am still allive [sic], but in jail,' read a message sent at 1:15 p.m. GMT on Friday. It was followed a few minutes later with a second message, also in English, that read, 'here is archi in kunduz. in the jail of commander lativ.' The message referred to the Dasht-e-Archi district of Kunduz where he was being held. On Tuesday, speaking in Tokyo, Tsuneoka revealed how he managed to convince his captors to give him access to the Internet. 'He asked me if I knew how to use it, so I had a look and explained it to him,' said Tsuneoka. 'I called the customer care number and activated the phone,' he said."
Per this article (http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/6698137-how-abducted-reporter-kosuke-tsuneoka-used-twitter-while-in-captivity) they released him because was muslim... So his tweets had nothing to do with anything....
Yes, when you get a hold of some guy's phone for a couple minutes, you are going to set up your email account, log in, remember the email addresses of your friends, and send them mail.
Or you can go on twitter and leave a message that all your followers will see. And no, if you have been missing for months and suddenly post a message, they are not going to think "nah, this is twitter, it's probably fake, we'll just ignore this".
I say, let's hope more of them get exposed to the Internet and the wider world in general because that tends to (though not always!) curb extremism.
The guard did something under the pretense that the prisoner was doing something helpful for him.
That is stupid and/or gullible.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
The guy says in TFA that he quite explicitly explained what the effect of him posting something on Twitter would be:
"They asked what that was. And I told them that if you write something on it, then you can reach many Japanese journalists. So they said, 'try it'."
So then, where's the trick, again?
except that his captors weren't Taliban but a group of corrupt local warlords trying to stir the taliban government.
this is from his tweet - http://twitter.com/shamilsh/status/23085559558
geek page at KY speaks
I'm a bit late to this story (read it yesterday), but here's a link to the Mainichi Daily News which has an article on the same subject. I did not read the IT World article so I don't know how much overlap there is.
Mainichi news article.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower