Could Twitter be a terrorist tool?

by Rich Bowden - Oct 26 2008, 21:01

The popular micro-blogging service could be used to direct terrorist attacks, a draft report from the U.S. army has claimed.

The report by the 304th Military Intelligence Battalion, which was posted on the website of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), also identifies Global Positioning System Maps as a potential terrorist tool in its brief to examine how mobile and web technologies could be abused by terrorist organisations.

Drawn from open source intelligence the study found that users of Twitter send out short messages "Tweets" to their friends, a method of communication which had proved to be extremely effective.

"Twitter has also become a social activism tool for socialists, human rights groups, communists, vegetarians, anarchists, religious communities, atheists, political enthusiasts, hacktivists and others to communicate with each other and to send messages to broader audiences," the report said and pointed to the potential for abuse.

"Twitter is already used by some members to post and/or support extremist ideologies and perspectives," the report continued. "Extremist and terrorist use of Twitter could evolve over time to reflect tactics that are already evolving in use byhacktivists and activists for surveillance," it said. "This could theoretically be combined with targeting."

The study reasoned how Twitter could be used with other freely available technologies such as Google Maps to carry out a terrorist operation.

"Terrorists could theoretically use Twitter social networking in the US as an operation tool," it said. "However, it is unclear whether that same theoretical tool would be available to terrorists in other countries and to what extent."

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