All A'Twitter

Twitter has become quite the instant communication device in recent months. Several people have discussed it with me.

One colleague tells me how it is now becoming a substitute for short blog posts among many people. Jack Welch guest-hosted on CNBC Friday morning, confessing to twittering some of his opinions and activities to followers. Karl Rove is an avid twitterer.

However, there's a darker side to twittering which was brought to mind last week. I recently reconnect with a former business colleague. For a variety of reasons, I won't provide more identification than that.

As she and I recently discussed technological advances, and their effects on ease of terrorist attacks on US soil, we touched upon modern communications technology.

In the context of my conversation with her, Twitter suddenly took on a whole new light. She confirmed that this service poses immense headaches for the NSA. Monitoring tweets is a nightmare, compared to, say, cellular traffic.

Twitter is asynchronous and uses fairly brief messages. Thus, it could be a very effective one-way tool for signaling, much as, during WWII, spies were operated using coded radio messages.

The torrent of tweets adds to the message volume which, theoretically, must be monitored by those whose business is the monitoring of electronic message traffic in the US.

Perhaps the effectiveness of free, publicly-available communications tools was best illustrated by a defense-related intelligence representative at a public forum, who, my friend explained, said something to this effect,

'The publicly-available messaging tools are better than our own internal systems.'