Caught a tweet by Ethan Marcotte this afternoon pointing to a rather fascinating article over on Yahoo! News. Apparently the 304th Military Intelligence Battalion released a report on the evolution of web communities and social technology these last few years, and how terrorists might apply these advances to some nefarious means. The usual suspects are listed – online games, mobile devices, what have you – with the exception of one particular chapter entitled, “Potential for Terrorist Use of Twitter.” That’s right, the social messaging service we’ve all come to love (or hate) with that cute little blue bird and morbidly obese whale is appearently a potential hotbed of terrorist activity. Lordy, lordy! A messaging service with virtually no realistic privacy control is a perfect platform for passing top secret sleeper cell orders. Not just that, but …
“Twitter has also become a social activism tool for socialists, human rights groups, communists, vegetarians, anarchists, religious communities, atheists, political enthusiasts, hacktivists and others to communicate with each other and to send messages to broader audiences,” the report said.
Are you kidding me? My first question would be why the military bunches up vegetarians, human rights groups and religious communities along with communists, anarchists and terrorist cells. I’m an atheist, a border-line vegetarian and if you want to apply labels a hacker… am I a one man tweeting sleeper cell? Fuck this noise. This country is in dire need of a CTO. Someone in touch with technology and capable of explaining why reports like this are complete and utter, fear-mongering bullshit.
Check out Yahoo!’s write up here, the Wired article Yahoo! picked up on (very interesting read) and the report itself over at the Federation of American Scientists website (warning: pdf file).
Tags: twitter
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