Slashdot Mirror
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."
...how was he actually rescued? I see correlation between his tweets and his release but no causation.
http://www.bynarystudio.com
I agree it's still a leap of faith to conclude that the Twitter access freed the journalist...
How much VC funding has twitter spent? $50M or so? Gotta get some good press out there in order to recoup that investment.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Tricking his captors into letting him send a Tweet is nothing compared to tricking VC's into giving twitter $50M.
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.
Not really, it doesn't. If you remember those studies in UK, the second generation of Muslim immigrants was both more outwardly westernized (clothing, behavior, use of modern tech), and much more radicalized than their parent (I think it was 25% saying that they support al-Qaeda?). The Net may expose you to a multitude of opinions, but people are very good at ignoring all but those that tell them what they like to hear; and Islamic extremism has mastered the art of propaganda very, very well.
Ah, if only it worked that way.
I've heard a story about Chechnya, that local Wahhabi terrorists consider underwear un-Islamic because it was not worn in Prophet's times by him or any of his followers. So, they take it, there might be no harm in it, but they cannot be sure - so they don't wear it. And then one Russian journalist noted that Prophet's army didn't have AKs, either, but somehow that doesn't make a connection.
It does both.
Some people embrace the new, the foreign, the unknown, and eagerly incorporate it into their own identity. At least partially.
Others see it as threatening, dangerous, a temptation to be resisted, and react by withdrawing, becoming more fundamentalist.
I tend to think isolation and failed integration is the largest enabler for the latter. Too many may live -in- the west physically, but nevertheless have a parallell society with little actual integration. Live in their own areas, go to their own schools, shop in their own shops, have friends mainly from the region they come from, rather than the region they live in.
On the flipside, there's many people who live -in- the middle east, but nevertheless *do* have friends and contacts in other cultures, I am certain, that serves as a pretty good vaccine against extremism. It's one thing to say "death to America!", it's another thing to say "death to my friend John, with the part-time job and 2 daugthers that started school last month."
It works in reverse too. I've got a much more nuanced view of the middle east now that I've got friends there. I'm much less inclined to knee-jerk along the "they're all the same" lines. Because guess what, they're not.