The Army’s 304th Military Intelligence Battalion recently produced a presentation entitled, “ al Qaida-Like Mobile Discussions & Potential Creative Uses”. The presentation has some interesting information regarding, ‘Pro Terrorist Propoganda Cell Phone Interfaces”, mobile phone target surveillance, “Voice Changers for Terrorist Telephone Calls” and finally, “Potential for Terrorist use of Twitter”. This last topic has received some commentary having been seized upon by Wired’s Danger Room Blog. As usual with discussions centered on the terrorist potential use of any new technology, negative comments focus on the, “ why don’t they just use the telephone” argument. However, this as ever misses the wider point.
Twitter has been around since July 2006 and is billed as a micro-blogging service with a social networking aspect – it is a highly fluid platform that can be meshed with a variety of other online tools. As with many innovations in this space its full utility is simply unknown – therefore, it is useful to speculate on both the potential negative and positive uses. As a society we now have a pretty good idea of how the telephone works.
The military intelligence report highlights three scenarios relating to how Twitter could be used – terrorist command and control, terrorist real-time targeting for suicide operations and pre-operational research on terrorist targets who use Twitter. Of these scenarios it is the latter that is so far potentially the most ‘negative’ use of Twitter. It is possible to produce an unnerving amount of information relating to specific Twitter users based on their social patterns and individual entries. As a rule of thumb it seems that it is never the primary functions of these platforms, which are the most revealing but their secondary and tertiary applications.
Twitter along with its competitor Jaiku continues to develop and as it does so will its impact on society. It is worth noting that the LA Fire Department is making good use of Twitter as a real-time incident information platform. Perhaps the terrorist use of Twitter will be the revival of alhesbah as a micro-blog sending ideological updates to followers as well as including LAFD style incident updates – I would add this as, potential use scenario 4.
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