"The terrorists were probably following eye-witness tweets and Flickr photo streams during the Mumbai attacks."

Actually, I very much doubt the terrorists had time to check Flickr and Twitter accounts, or even to watch television (though that is more possible, seeing as there would be televisions in every room). What is somewhat possible is that associates on the outside could be sending them updates, pictures, etc. gleaned from the internet. However, they may worry about communications being traced back... These communication possibilities must surely be on the minds of counter-terrorist operatives, and one possibility would probably be to have some sort of mobile jamming device for mobile phones to bring to such locations - but then they also face the risk of cutting off useful communications from hostages and the like. Such devices already exist, and apparently helped save Musharraf's life when a bomb was not able to be detonated by a mobile device. Long-term, one can easily imagine certain locations having mobile-phone jamming devices - I think they exist in some cinemas already, and I can imagine some lecturers wouldn't mind having them in lecture halls :) On the downside, they could also be used very effectively to disrupt dissent and mobilisation - one can imagine the Burmese authorities would love to get their hands on something like that. Cheers, Julian ++++++++++ Blog: www.julianhopkins.net Skype: julhop IM: jfprhopkins@hotmail.com Message: 1 Date: Sat, 29 Nov 2008 16:22:20 -0800 From: Larry Press <lpress@csudh.edu> Subject: Re: [Air-L] Evolution of the Wikipedia page on the attacks in, Mumbai To: "air-l@listserv.aoir.org" <air-l@listserv.aoir.org> Message-ID: <4931DCBC.2070406@csudh.edu> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1"; format=flowed

And the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel , usually quite positive about digital media (the website is the no 1 on political news in Germany) criticizes the quality of the citizen journalists and writes about

Have you got a link to this?

Another topic to think about : the need of having eye witnesses and instant explanations in the press:

This reminds me of the 1991 Soviet coup attempt, during which my colleagues and I used USENET News to keep information flowing into and out of Russia. ABC requested an interview at the time, but to have granted it might have compromised the position of our Russian networking colleagues. The terrorists were probably following eye-witness tweets and Flickr photo streams during the Mumbai attacks. Larry