Switched has a new home! Huffpost Tech.

Click here to visit the new home of Switched!

Hot on HuffPost Tech:

See More Stories
AOL Tech

Technology Used for Evil (and Good) in Mumbai Attacks

by Lee Bains on December 3, 2008 at 11:32 AM


The tragic events that took place in Mumbai last week have catalyzed widespread discussions concerning consumer technology and its evolving role on the world stage.

Far from a militarily equipped force, the terrorist group that struck Mumbai last week coordinated the attacks with devices readily available to the public, as the Wired Blog points out.
Communicating from their attack boat via satellite phone, the terrorists used a GPS system to navigate their way into Mumbai, where they kept in constant touch with each other via cell phone and in constant touch with media coverage via the Internet. The group even made their statements through e-mail, using one of many publicly available, untraceable remailer programs.

While the attackers used technology to conceal, victims and witnesses used it to expose. As the BBC reports, Twitter erupted with activity during the attacks.



Wednesday, Tweets rushed out of Mumbai well before the international media ever picked up the story. That being said, although Twitter reports were among the earliest, they were also afflicted with problems all too common in the blogosphere; as the attacks waged on, Twitter became a hive buzzing with hearsay, confusion and, in some instances, outright inaccuracies.

One Tweet, reiterated innumerable times, claimed that the Indian government was calling for a cessation of Twittering, as the transmissions were compromising police tactics. A reliable source for that claim still has not surfaced. Hysteria also surfaced in greatly exaggerated reports of casualties. Blogger Tim Mallon told CNN, "During the hour or so I followed on Twitter there were wildly differing estimates of the numbers killed and injured - ranging up to 1,000."

While Twitter may have at first served a noble purpose in alerting the world to the despicable acts in Mumbai, it might have done just as much damage by increasingly becoming a sort of digital-age party line, rife with sensationalistic exaggeration and groundless gossip, a trend about which we are reminded by the BBC's dot.life blog.

With such powerful communicative tools at our disposal, we ought to think well before using them, lest we go about yelling without saying a thing. [From: Wired Blog and BBC]

Tags: disaster, disaster tech, DisasterTech, india, microblogging, mumbai attacks, MumbaiAttacks, social-networking, twitter

HuffPost AOL Social News Most Popular