Posted on Thursday, 30th October 2008 by Indus

The U.S. intelligence community is concerned that terrorists might use micro-blogging tool Twitter to coordinate attacks, according to a purported draft Army intelligence report posted on the Web. The report–present by the 304th Military Intelligence Battalion and posted to the Federation of American Scientists Web site–examines the possible ways terrorists could use mobile and Web technologies such as the Global Positioning System, digital maps, and Twitter mashups to plan and execute terrorist attacks. The report (PDF), which appears to have been first presented earlier this month, was reported Friday by Wired magazine’s Noah Shachtman.

A chapter titled “Potential for Terrorist Use of Twitter,” presents general, introductory information on Twitter and how it works, and describes how the service was used to report details of a recent earthquake in Los Angeles and by activists at the Republican National Convention. “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. The report describes hacktivists as politically motivated hackers. However, the overview notes that the research used to generate the report was gathered from open source intelligence and not compared with information in classified venues.

Source: Cnet, ABC

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