Twitter comes of age reporting on Mumbai attacks

The micro-blogging service Twitter has been providing updates to the attacks in Mumbai.

Link to Twitter feed.

Some of the commentary and links are off-base but it is a fascinating view into how the ‘crowd’ can monitor and report on real-time events. For example, there is a link posted to a ‘google doc’ spreadsheet listing known casualties. Link here.

Terrorist attacks may remain disturbingly similar but the way they are reported and examined changes in step with the rapid pace of virtualization.

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Aardvark’s and Avatars

There continues to be some discussion and rejection of the idea that terrorists would be able to exploit new technology platforms such as social networking and virtual worlds. In a recent post the blogger Abu Aardvark (aka Marc Lynch from GW University) goes some way in debunking ideas surrounding terrorist use of social networking, Wiki’s and virtual worlds. He further states that Al Qaeda is now behind the curve in using the area of user-generated content and interactivity. While, the aardvark’s media analysis relating to ‘al-Qaeda outreach’ appears to be sound I think he misses a fundamental point about terrorists and technology.

The defining feature of terrorism and technology is its adaptive quality. It is highly unlikely that individual terrorists or terrorist groups would exactly replicate the mainstream functions of the technology abu aardvark highlights in his post. It is more likely they would take certain elements from the various innovations and mesh them together or otherwise distort them. So an al-Qaeda Facebook isn’t going to happen anytime soon but using the system to identify IDF soldiers for possible assassination already has. Similarly an ‘AQThirdlife’, which replicates the virtual world Second Life seems unlikely but using some of its key features still seems probable. The virtual money transfer aspect continues to be a high on most peoples list of concerns (this is discussed in a recent SSRN paper written by Stephen Landman, Funding Bin Laden’s Avatar: A proposal for the regulation of Virtual Hawalas, which he has kind enough to share with me). Aardvark’s point about an AQThird life also fails to account for phenomena such as the virtual caliphate, which is running in the UK, where users log into areas to see and hear sermons by dead or expelled radical preachers – there continues to be a market for extremism and virtual exposure to it is potentially more powerful than real exposure.

As ever the central point is that given rapid and increasing virtualization flexible thinking and planning is required to conceptualize the next form of terrorist threat — blogs appear to be a great enabler of this practice.

Originally posted on CounterTerrorism Blog

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Abu Aardvark on al-Qaeda 2.0

Interesting post by Abu Aardvark (aka Marc Lynch from GW University) on terrorist use of technology.

Link to posting here.

Some interesting comments comparing outreach and operations.

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