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Spy Fears: Twitter Terrorists, Cell Phone Jihadists – Annotated
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Could Twitter become terrorists’ newest killer app? A draft Army intelligence report, making its way through spy circles, thinks the miniature messaging software could be used as an effective tool for coordinating militant attacks.
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The report is roughly divided into two halves. The first is based mostly on chatter from Al-Qaeda-affiliated online forums.
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Then the presentation launches into an even-more theoretical discussion of how militants might pair some of these mobile applications with Twitter, to magnify their impact.
- Wait. How was the first "half"–actually, the part about cell phones was most of the report–"theoretical?" It was telling us what the jihadists said on their websites about what they think about the use of cell phones, GPS, etc. That’s not "theoretial." Either they said those things or they didn’t. As for the other "half," most of the section on Twitter was devoted to reporting factual information about how Twitter has been used by geographically dispersed groups to either report information in real time or to coordinate action. Only the last three paragraphs (quoted in the Wired story) were speculative, "theoretical" scenarios…three paragraphs (roughly one page) of an eleven page document. – post by TransTracker
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