Britain’s new M16, Sir John Sawers, has been called into question due to information sharing on Facebook by his wife. Entries exposed where they lived, places they frequented, personal details about family members, including a brother that is a known Holocaust denier, and his bathing suit of choice that led the Guardian to publish the story “A Spy in Speedos and Other Sartorial Misjudgments.”
The BBC contextualized the faux pas with reference to the man who coined Barack Obama’s campaign slogan, “Yes we can,” Jon Favreau’s posting of a cardboard cut-out of him and Hillary Clinton on his personal Facebook profile.
Meanwhile, secret forces in Iran have tried using geo-tracking of IP addresses and other targeting to pinpoint people sharing information around the recent elections. The Nation’s blog provides an excellent coverage of how tweets, texts, and video uploads have spawned a worldwide counter-revolution.
Although slightly off in his vernacular with a reference that the revolution was “twitted” instead of “tweeted,” Marc Ambinder of the Atlantic provides an excellent recap of the butterfly effect and the potential implications Iran has for grassroots politics:
as Iranian authorities shut down internet servers, it allowed younger protesters, particularly those affiliated with universities in Tehran, to organize and to follow updates by Mir Hossein Mousavi; by spreading the word about the location of government crackdowns and the threat of machine-gun-wielding soldiers, it probably saved the lives of any number of would-be revolutionaries.
We don’t know how many Iranians belong to Twitter; there seems to have been about two dozen active voices from Tehran, but if we assume a multiplier effect — these 24 people can coordinate with their 20 friends — the use of the technology as a central organizing hub that circumvented official channels of communication cannot be understated. In this way, Twitter served as an intelligence service for the Iranian opposition.
Now TechCrunch, the Christian Monitor, and a host of others are making reference to the Twitter founders deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize. Two polar opposite uses of personal publishing with drastically different consequences for national security! Thanks to Jeff Malmad for originally alerting me to the story of John Sawyers published in the Jerusalem Post.
