UPDATE: to properly cite David Stephenson
I can’t wait to see what Schneier makes of this, but I am disappointed with the thrust of what Tim quotes below, from David Stephenson.
They appear to be suggesting that the government – say, for instance, the TSA – should be invited to tell people what to say-and-do with Twitter; to me, this is only one step from inviting them to censor it. There is more terror in the scenario that Stephenson appears to suggest:
Oh my God I am stuck under the rubble in a bombed-out hotel, I could Twitter my location but then the terrorists would come and bomb me a second time, because they would never have thought of setting-off a second bomb to cause more chaos without checking Twitter!
I could shout-out too, but then they might come and kill me, under all this rubble…
…than is extant from Twitter.
The language is regrettably unclear – eg: “people can and will use these devices and apps in a terrorist attack” – does he mean bad-guys or good-guys? And if Stephenson means bad-guys, what is to be done? Terrorists use other parts of infrastructure too: cars, buses, roads, cellphones.
Maybe we should just ban terrorism to prevent that. Oh, wait…
(my emphasis, below)
Good piece by W. David Stephenson:
Once again, the first news of the Mumbai attacks came not through the media, but through Twitter. India is extremely sophisticated in use of mobile devices, probably more so than is the case in the US, and many Indians are active users of Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and other mobile social networks. It’s imperative that US officials closely track how Indians are using these services during the continuing attacks, and try to glean ideas on how they could be adapted to the US.
I can’t stress enough: people can and will use these devices and apps in a terrorist attack, so it is imperative that officials start telling us what kind of information would be relevant from Twitter, Flickr, etc. (and, BTW, what shouldn’t be spread: one Twitter user in Mumbai tweeted me that people were sending the exact location of people still in the hotels, and could tip off the terrorists) and that they begin to monitor these networks in disasters, terrorist attacks, etc.
Tim O’Reilly, Founder & CEO O’Reilly Media
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tim@oreilly.com, http://radar.oreilly.com
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