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."

Comments

Welcome home, Tsuneoka-san.

[kurokame]

That is some Odysseus-grade cunning right there. You've done your species proud. Please have lots of grandkids and then tell them about this repeatedly.

Re:Journalists Trick Slashdot Into Believing Story

[rsborg]

There is no information in the article that indicates that the Internet access was gained by "a trick". The journalist asked.

It's not spelled out, but it's in the article:

The soldier had heard of the Internet, but he didn't know what it was. When Tsuneoka mentioned it to him, he was eager to see it, but the phone wasn't signed up to receive the carrier's GPRS data service for accessing the Internet. "I called the customer care number and activated the phone," he said. Soon after he had the captor's phone configured for Internet access. "Once I told them I was able to access, they said 'how do you use it?', 'can we see Al Jazeera?'." Tsuneoka said he explained they just needed to type "Al Jazeera" into Google search to access the Qatar-based TV news network's website. "But if you are going to do anything, you should use Twitter," he said he told them. "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'."

Simple social engineering, he befriended the guard, and showed the guard how to better use his "keys".

All that said, I agree it's still a leap of faith to conclude that the Twitter access freed the journalist... for all we know, he was already on the way out by way of negotiations with the captors, and the Twitter incident was ... incidental to the real release reasons. Poorly written article indeed.