How Terrorists May Abuse Micro-Blogging Channels Like Twitter
A recent US Army intelligence report identifies Twitter as a potential communication channel for terrorist activities. I think it is fantastic that intelligence efforts like this have the foresight to recognize emerging channels of communication and that there is effort being put into proactively enumerating the potential use cases. Yet, I am not impressed with the limited case studies presented in the report (the obvious case of Twitter being used for communication in addition to extremely specific situations of Twitter being utilized to trigger explosive devices). I feel that the use cases presented in this report are a good start, but they do not go beyond the obvious scenarios. Therefore, in this article, I want to further the discussion on how micro-blogging channels may be leveraged by terrorist organizations to obtain real time surveillance and intelligence of their efforts. I feel this sort of a conversation will be beneficial to counter-intelligence efforts (I will write a separate article on how Twitter may be actively leveraged by counter-intelligence). (O’Reilly)
