Twitter Terrorist Tool - Security Threat

[TahoeBlue]

Since there are reports that twitter is being used to coordinate demonstations in Iran I thought this article  particularly interesting ....

http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20/2008/10/25/how-twitter-could-be-a-security-threat-terrorist-tweets-aplenty/

October 25, 2008 | How Twitter could be a security threat - Terrorist tweets aplenty
By Dave Parrack

Twitter is a micro-blogging service that has already gained a huge amount of fans amongst the tech community, and is currently trying to gain a foothold of popularity amongst a wider mainstream demographic. But that wider set of fans could include terrorists who would use Twitter to spread their message and even direct operations.

This warning comes from the U.S. Army by way of an intelligence report 304th Military Intelligence Battalion. It was posted on the Federation of American Scientists website before Noah Shachtman brought it to the attention of the wider public on Wired.

The report identifies three new technologies as possible threats to national security. Alongside Twitter, Global Positioning System maps and voice-changing software are claimed to be “potential terrorist tools”.

Twitter is rapidly becoming an essential tool for many. Back in July, news of the Los Angeles earthquake rebounded around Twitter before the event was picked up by any news organisation. The Presidential candidates are also using it to keep up with their supporters. And in April, a man used Twitter to alert his friends that he’d been arrested in Egypt.

But these uses could potentially have a dark side, at least if you believe the scaremongering of the U.S. intelligence services. The report states:

“Twitter has 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,”

“Twitter is already used by some members to post and/or support extremist ideologies and perspectives,”

“Extremist and terrorist use of Twitter could evolve over time to reflect tactics that are already evolving in use by hacktivists and activists for surveillance. This could theoretically be combined with targeting.”

It’s theoretically possible I suppose but then every piece of emerging technology can be used by either side of this global war on terror. Does that mean we should halt progress to ensure our security? Especially when terrorists can use completely non-cutting edge techniques such as nail bombs and home-made explosives to inflict damage on people and property.

I’m glad there are people watching out for our safety but I tend to regard this as pure scaremongering. And all that does is make us all live in fear rather than peace.

[Revolt426]

http://www.larouchepac.com/node/10030

Soros's 'Twitter Revolution'

- TWITTER/FACEBOOK: A STRATEGIC THREAT -

by Matthew Ogden

April 16—The recent protests-turned-violent in Moldova's capital, Chisinau, perpetrated by 10,000 mostly college-age youth, from Moldova and other countries in Europe, are being dubbed the "Twitter Revolution." This name was given to the flash-riots at Moldova's capital square the day after the Communist Party won a majority in the parliamentary elections, in an article by Evgeny Morozov, published in Foreign Policy magazine April 7.

Morozov, born in Belarus, is currently an active fellow of George Soros's Open Society Institute of New York, and a board member of the OSI's Information Program, formed to study how to use the Internet to facilitate "democracy movements" in "closed societies," to overthrow "authoritarian regimes." In the Foreign Policy piece, Morozov openly boasts that four so-called authoritarian states are on the Information Program's hit list: Tajikistan, Moldova, Syria, and Thailand. The Soros agent-provocateur openly bragged on his blog that these are "places that I visit frequently," studying opportunities that information technology and Internet networking present for overthrowing these "authoritarian regimes."

Soros and his Open Society mafia are now out in the open, waging Jacobin destabilizations against governments on London's hit list. In March 2009, The Economist, the flagship publication of the City of London's financial oligarchy, published an Economist Intelligence Unit report, promoting just such global Jacobin insurrections, under the provocative headline, "Manning the Barricades." Soros, the billionaire hedge-fund speculator, and self-professed wartime Nazi collaborator, is an agent of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, under the personal supervision of Lord Mark Malloch-Brown, who, until recently, was vice chair of the Open Society Institute and also deputy director of Soros's hedge fund.

- 'Flashmobs' -

In his article in Foreign Policy, Morozov cites the recent riots in Greece, which then spread to the rest of Europe, as another recent example of how Twitter was used to incite "flashmobs," or "spontaneous-but-networked protest," which, he claims, in a December 2008 Economist article titled "Rioters of the World Unite," is now the new wave of protest method—replacing the now-outdated, pre-planned "set-piece" protests outside economic summits and so forth, of the form that we remember from Genoa and Seattle.

Morozov's article in Foreign Policy cites studies done by the Berkman Center at Harvard University, on the use of "technology" in the Soros-sponsored Orange Revolution, five years ago in Ukraine. At the end of the article, he writes, suggestively, that these Moldova protests "present an interesting case-study that I hope academic institutions like Harvard's Berkman Center and others would take on and examine in detail." In a blog called openDemocracy, based in Britain, Morozov also mentions the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, a think-tank at Harvard, which he says, "is currently running large-scale econometric models to observe how Internet access is correlated with political instability." Their study finds that, "an increase in cell-phone availability increases the likelihood (at least perceived by the public) that the government might be overthrown by violent means."

The Harvard report cites the "Two-Step Flow Theory" of Paul Lazarsfeld, partner of cyberneticist Kurt Lewin, the intellectual father of today's Behavioral Freakanomics, which models the effect of media on society as mediated through multiple "opinion leaders," who each possesses a network of "individuals in social contact with the opinion leader."

The LaRouche PAC pamphlet "Is the Devil in Your Laptop?" published in 2007, documents the long history of the use of this type of "social engineering" and "group psychology" to threaten the stability of sovereign nation-states. See, especially, "INSNA: 'Handmaidens of British Colonialism," by David Christie. This document is critical background intelligence material for nation-states seeking to protect the stability of their governments from George Soros's social-networking "democracy revolutions," now waging a global offensive of destabilization.

As Lyndon LaRouche commented, this movement is a Dionysian cult formation. Twitter, the latest high-tech instant communications system, for activating large numbers of people in real-time, via phone and computer links, has been adopted by British intelligence agent Soros and his Jacobin minions, to create maximum social chaos—among what is largely a youth cult, driven to despair and rage by the global financial and economic collapse. Those deployed by Twitter in this fashion are, as LaRouche warned, a Nietzschean fascist, existentialist movement, that can be mobilized, like Hitler's youth, on behalf of top-down oligarchic interests, to which they are totally oblivious.

[phasma]

“Twitter has 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

erm . . . vegetarians? Are we a direct threat to national security now?

LOL!

[TahoeBlue]

Just a little history on Twitter, a company that has not earned one dime yet.....

Twitter's value (to the NWO) may not be purely economic

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Dorsey

Jack Dorsey is an American software architect and businessperson best known as the creator of Twitter.[2] BusinessWeek called him one of technology's "best and brightest".[3] MIT's Technology Review named him to the TR35, an outstanding innovator under the age of 35.[4]

Dorsey grew up in St. Louis, Missouri.[5] By age 14, he was interested in dispatch routing. Some of his open source software in this genre is still in use by taxicab companies.[5] While working on dispatching as a programmer he later moved to California.[3][6]

In Oakland in 2000, Dorsey started his company to dispatch couriers, taxis, and emergency services from the Web.[7] His other projects and ideas at this time included networks of medical devices and a "frictionless service market".[7] In July 2000, building on dispatching[5] and inspired in part by LiveJournal and possibly by AOL Instant Messenger, he had the idea for the realtime status communication.[7]

When he first saw implementations of instant messaging, Dorsey had wondered if the software's user status output could be shared among friends easily.[5] He approached Odeo, who at the time happened to be interested in text messaging.[5] Dorsey and Biz Stone decided that SMS text suited the status message idea, and built a prototype of Twitter in about two weeks.[5] The idea attracted many users at Odeo and investment from Evan Williams[5] who had left Google after selling them Pyra Labs and Blogger.

Twitter, Inc.
 
Biz Stone and Dorsey accepting a TechCrunch award for best mobile startup Dorsey, Stone and Williams co-founded Obvious which then spun off Twitter, Inc.[5] As chief executive officer, Dorsey saw the startup through two rounds of funding by the venture capitalists who back the company.[8] In October 2008[9] Williams took over the role of CEO, and Dorsey became chairman of the board.[10]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter
...
Since its creation in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Twitter has gained notability and popularity worldwide. It is sometimes described as the "SMS of the Internet",[2] as it provides the functionality—via its application programming interface (API)—for other desktop and web-based applications to send and receive short text messages, often obscuring the Twitter service itself.

Through SMS, users can communicate with Twitter through five gateway numbers: short codes for the United States, Canada, India, New Zealand, and an Isle of Man-based number for international use. There is also a short code in the United Kingdom which is only accessible to those in the Vodafone network.[3]
...
Finances
Twitter has raised US$57 million from venture capitalists. CEO Evan Williams raised about $22 million in venture capital.[7] Twitter is backed by Union Square Ventures, Digital Garage, Spark Capital, and Bezos Expeditions (led by Jeff Bezos of Amazon).[8] Institutional Venture Partners and Benchmark Capital backed Twitter in 2009, investing an additional $35 million. The Industry Standard has pointed to its lack of revenue as limiting its long-term viability.[9] On February 13, 2009, Twitter announced on its official blog[10] that it had closed a third round of funding in which it secured more than $35 million.[11]
...

In June 2009, following allegations of fraud in the Iranian presidential election of that year, protesters used Twitter as an effective rallying tool and as a method of communication with the outside world after the Iranian government blocked several other modes of communication.[72][73][74][75][76]

During the 2009 Iranian election protests, the mainstream media in the United States was criticized on Twitter for not covering the election.[77]. CNN in particular was criticized, with numerous individuals using the hashtag #CNNfail.[77] Twitter was also used to spread information and commit DDoS attacks.[78]

On June 15, Twitter rescheduled a planned 90-minute maintenance outage, after a number of Twitter users, as well as the US State Department, asked for a delay (including directly asking company executives), due to concerns about its role as a primary communication medium by the protesters in Iran.[79] [80]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benchmark_Capital

Benchmark Capital is a venture capital firm responsible for the early stage funding of some very successful startups. In 1997, the firm invested $6.7 million in eBay, which became worth more than $5 billion by the spring of 1999[1]. Other high profile investments include Ariba, Juniper Networks, Red Hat, and Twitter.

http://optionarmageddon.ml-implode.com/2009/05/15/twitter-investor-not-concerned-company-losing-money/
Twitter Investor Not Concerned Company Losing Money
May 15, 2009 – 2:44 am

Long-time angel investor Ron Conway talked with Bambi Francisco at EconSM Thursday….

Twitter: Conway isn’t concerned that Twitter isn’t making money yet. “If you look at some of the greatest companies that have ever come out of Silicon Valley—Google and Facebook—(these are) examples of companies that focused on critical mass before they worried about monetization.” He also does not think that Twitter will sell itself. “I think Twitter could be the next Facebook or Google in size—market size and potential. Why not stay an independent company?”

http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090604/twitter-investor-business-plan-comingby-2011/
Twitter Investor: Business Plan Coming…By 2011

Give the Twitter guys credit for honesty: Asked to explain how their big-hype, zero-revenue company will make money, as we did at last week’s All Things Digital conference, and they’ll cheerfully admit that they’re not sure.

If you’re a perspective buyer, whether that’s Microsoft (MSFT) or Google (GOOG), that has to be unsettling.Then again, the Twitter guys insist they’re not selling the company in the next five years. And their investors, who have plowed more than $50 million into the company, seem to be equally sanguine.

Or at least one is. Spark Capital’s Bijan Sabet says the company isn’t in a rush to start generating money — in large part because it’s raised so much money.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/twitter-raises-35-million/
02/13/2009
Twitter Raises $35 Million
By Claire Cain Miller
Updated 3:45 p.m.: Added comment from Todd Chaffee of Institutional Venture Partners.

Twitter has raised $35 million in venture capital, bringing the microblogging start-up’s total funding to $55 million.

The new money came from Institutional Venture Partners and Benchmark Capital. Peter Fenton, a partner at Benchmark who has also invested in Web 2.0 darlings Yelp and FriendFeed, will join the Twitter board.

The fundraising round brings in two top West Coast venture firms. The San Francisco start-up had previously raised $20 million from investors including Union Square Ventures, based in New York, and Spark Capital, based in Boston. Those firms will also participate in the latest round, as could previous angel investors including Ron Conway and Marc Andreessen, which could bring the total to $40 million, said Todd Chaffee of Institutional Venture Partners. They are still working out the final details.

The company was not looking for new investors and still has money in the bank, said Biz Stone, a co-founder, in an interview. In December, Twitter C.E.O. and co-founder Evan Williams said that though he had originally planned to raise more money in 2009, when the economy turned, he decided not to. But the two new investors approached Twitter, Mr. Stone said, and “we went for it.” Institutional Venture Partners closed its part of the deal on Jan. 16 and Benchmark closed its funding Thursday night.

The announcement from Mr. Williams appeared, of course, in fewer than 140 characters on Twitter: “We raised more money: http://bit.ly/mbEO9 I feel very fortunate we were able to do this and very excited about what we will build. Go team.”

“We’re fired up,” Mr. Chaffee said. “They’ve had unbelievably explosive organic growth like I’ve never seen before, and an amazing level of interest from developers, the digerati and the media. We really need all hands on deck to figure how to shepherd that growth.”

Twitter will use the money first and foremost to hire new people. “We really need to grow the company,” Mr. Stone said. “We have 29 employees, which is shockingly low considering the work we have to do.”

Despite its growing popularity — active users have increased 900 percent in the last year, Mr. Stone said — Twitter has not earned a single dollar. It does not sell advertising on its site and is free for users. The company plans to slowly roll out a revenue plan over the next few months. That will likely include charging businesses for certain features they can use to talk to customers on Twitter.

Though Twitter has said that revenue is a priority in the first quarter of this year, the new money could buy the company some time. “I would much rather have this thing grow to natural scale than build in a revenue model artificially, too quickly,” Mr. Chaffee said.

Mr. Fenton said he had been watching the company, which turned down a reported $500 million acquisition offer from Facebook last year, for two years.

“They decided to partner with an active West Coast syndicate to vigorously pursue the path of independence,” he said. “As a business opportunity, it jumped out to us as having many potential revenue streams that support, and don’t undermine, its success.”

[Sara2019]

I got the term 'twitter terrorist' from a blog on the same topic on Wired.com

[phasma]

“Twitter has 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

erm . . . vegetarians? Are we a direct threat to national security now?

LOL!

Again - didnt realise being a vegetarian put in league with communists, anarchists, hactivists etc. WTF!

[Stan]

“Twitter has 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,”

Funny how they left out fascists.

“Twitter is already used by some members to post and/or support extremist ideologies and perspectives,”

You already said presidential candidates used it. Talk about redundant.