Via Crunch Gear
By John Biggs
October 26th, 2008
A report by US Army Intelligence points to Twitter, GPS devices, and voice changing software as potential “terrorist tools.” Friend of CG, Noah Shachtman, posted the report on Danger Room noting that intelligence services have said that everything from MMORPGs to garage door openers could be potentially dangerous to Americas precious bodily fluids. They note:
“Twitter was recently used as a countersurveillance, command and control, and movement tool by activists at the Republican National Convention. The activists would Tweet each other and their Twitter pages to add information on what was happening with Law Enforcement near real time.”
Look: Twitter can’t even keep the Fail Whale at bay most days, let alone create a command and control structure for young men and women with a penchant for Anchor Steam beer and trail mix. As Shachtman notes in his piece, this report is good and bad. It’s good in that explores something most Army Intelligence employees probably know nothing about but bad in that it wastes valuable brain time on tools that are pretty much secondary to terrorist aims. Twitter contains no havok-making tools per se and its functionality could easily be recreated using SMS, carrier pigeons, and smoke signals. But at least now a bunch of US Army Intelligence officials probably have Twitter accounts, exposing them to possible surveillance.
