A report by the Federation of American Scientists, conducted by the 304th Military Intelligence Battalion, showed the potential mobile device and service threats that terrorists may use to coordinate future attacks. One of them is Twitter, the social network and microblogging site, which occupied two pages in the report. Twitter has already been used in several instances to report on events that have happened before the mainstream news media picked up on them. One specific example given by the FAS is an earthquake that occurred in L.A. on July 29, 2008. One Twitter user talked about the quake approximately four minutes prior to the information being reported by the news.

Another event that caught the attention of the people was at the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis in September, 2008. Protestors used Twitter to alert other about the movement of the police or where to find aid from pepper spray. These facts have led the U.S. military to outline three potential scenarios in which terrorist groups could use Twitter to cause harm to the U.S. Groups of potential terrorists have adopted Twitter in order to send information back and forth and to share ideas.

This presentation also mentions the benefits of the Nokia 6210 Navigator and how its GPS utilities could be used for “marksmanship, border crossings and in concealment of supplies”.

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. The report describes hacktivists as politically motivated hackers.