The Congressional Tweet: Transparency and National Security

Anyone in touch with the newest trends in the internet and social media is likely to know that the hottest thing on the block for 2008 was Twitter. The micro-blogging service allows users to enter 140 characters to answer the question “What are you doing?”. While Twitter has been popular with the “internet famous” like Kevin Rose, Leo Laporte, and others for some time now, President Obama’s explicit use of it during his campaign brought the service to the rest of the public. While most would agree that there is only so much information that could be packed into 140 characters, some members of the government and the armed forces are worried about its use as a terrorist communication tool, or its misuse to let the world know about secrets or plans.

A recent OSINT ( open-source intelligence) newsletter published by the Army’s 304th Military Intelligence Battalion highlights the ability for terrorists to take advantage of the service for orchestrating attacks. Their belief and fear stems from the rate at which information was spread from recent natural disasters. From their article, “…,the earthquake that occurred in Los Angeles July 29,2008 was reported via a Twitter member approximately four minutes prior to the information being reported by the news and within minutes there were hundreds of Tweets from people experiencing the earthquake first hand” (304th MI Bn OSINT Team). The 304th MI Bn also use the 2008 Republican National Convention as an example of how terrorists may use Twitter to coordinate attacks. Protesters used the service to alert others about police action, providing safe routes for the locked-down city. The article then goes on to provide a number of scenarios in which terrorists may use the service, in conjunction with Google Maps, to alert members of a cell about troop movements.

Terrorist use of Twitter as outlined by the 304th MI Bn OSINT

While the 304th’s article presents a number of situations in which Twitter could be used by terrorists, it provides no direct answer to this “problem”.
Time magazine also highlighted a more real governmental / military “situation” when Representative Pete Hoekstra (MI-R) tweeted that he had “Just landed in Baghdad”. Doing this he effectively “alert[ed] the nearly 3,000 people who have signed up to follow him on the social-networking service of the trip that he and five others, including House minority leader John Boehner, had embarked on” (Newton-Small). While many people without any security clearance, including his wife, were aware of the trip, the Pentagon did not take the situation lightly. The heart of the security of the United States called for “reviewing its policies for briefing lawmakers in advance about trips to war zones”.

A research article by Micah L. Sifry titled “A See-Through Society: How the web is opening up our democracy” highlights exactly how the internet and social network sites like Facebook and Twitter are affecting government and its transparency with the common person. From the individual, to the city, to the federal government, information is being provided at a rate and a scale like never before. In January 2008, Mayor Mike Bloomberg of New York City made a public address about the city’s new service, Citywide Performance Recording, that would “put ‘a wealth of data at people’s fingertips—fire response times, noise complaints, trees planted by the Parks Department, you name it. More than five hundred different measurements from forty-five city agencies’” (Sifry). Sifry also references the concept of the “World Live Web”, with people “using everything from mobile phones that can stream video live online to simple text message postings to the micro-blogging service Twitter…contributing to a real-time patter of information about what is going on around them. Much of what results is little more than noise, but increasingly sophisticated and simple-to-use filtering tools can turn some of it into information of value.” He describes an election-day situation that involved filtering Twitter to decipher a real-time report on their polling experience.

While the article by Sifry touches less on the potential downsides of transparency and wealth of unfiltered information, the implications are obvious. As noted by the 304th Military Intelligence Battalion, an opportunity exists to use tools like Twitter to coordinate elaborate ambushes. However, it is important to factor in the entire situation, rather than soloing out a single service. As advances in technology continue to happen at an increased pace, so do the opportunities to use the web with ill intent. Terrorists do not need to rely on a service like Twitter when the technical knowledge of how to build their own communication method is widely available. At the end of the day, the advantages in transparency with government, corporations, and public services provided by Twitter and other social networks are too great to be tarnished simply by their ability to be used in a negative way.

Sources
304th MI Bn OSINT Team. “Sample Overview: al Qaida-Like Mobile Discussion & Potential Creative Uses.” 304th Military Intelligence Battalion Periodic Newsletter, October 16, 2008. http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/mobile.pdf (accessed February 18, 2009).

Newton-Small, Jay. ” Congress’s New Love Affair with Twitter.” Time Magazine, February 11, 2009. http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1878773-3,00.html (accessed February 18, 2009).

Sifry, Micah L. “A See-Through Society.” Columbia Journalism Review 47, no. 5 (January 2009): 43-47. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed February 12, 2009).