US gov to use Twitter and Facebook

Terrorist Alerts?

[tangor]

Could this be coming to a social network near you?

A 19-page document, marked "for official use only" and dated April 1, describes the step-by-step process that would occur behind the scenes when the government believes terrorists might be threatening Americans. It describes the sequence of notifying members of Congress, then counterterrorism officials in states and cities, then governors and mayors and, ultimately, the public.

It even specifies details about how many minutes U.S. officials can wait before organizing urgent conference calls to discuss pending threats. It places the Homeland Security secretary, currently Janet Napolitano, in charge of the National Terrorism Advisory System.

The new terror alerts would also be published online using Facebook and Twitter "when appropriate," the plan said, but only after federal, state and local leaders have been notified.

[news.yahoo.com...]

[wyweb]

Whoa.. nice catch tangor.

I would think twitter would be the appropriate mechanism to use in in this instance - not facebook.

Big Brother steps in, takes over complete control of twitter and alerts everybody to what's going on. Much faster than facebook, although the two used in concert would make for a wider spread.

[graeme_p]

It needs some way of making official warnings (e.g. from governments and other trustworthy sources) unmistakeably distinct from anything else. We do not need another channel for scares.

Extra channels of communication could have saved a lot of the lives that were lost here to the South Asian Tsunami. The people running the multi-lateral tsunami warning mechanism did not pass a warning on because they did not know why to contact in a country that had not joined their organisation. If it had been plastered all over Twitter and Facebook there is a good chance it would have reached someone who know what to do.

[piatkow]

If it had been plastered all over Twitter and Facebook there is a good chance it would have reached someone who know what to do.

Then the person concerned would have missed it because these were blocked by their office firewall.

[wyweb]

I have to admit that when Twitter first started taking off, the potential I saw was actually for a warning system. Tsunamis came to mind immediately.

So many people were signing up and it got so big so fast. And such a wide spread with regard to audience.

I'm left now wondering why Gov hasn't set up something similar.

But I wonder about a lot of things.

[lucy24]

"Dated April 1" eh. By weird coincidence, that was also the date my host sent out a mass mailing telling us they were about to outsource their technical support.