SSI News

A Miami-Dade fire captain who blasted the handling of the Trayvon Martin case in a Facebook rant has been demoted.

Tags: Miami Fire Rescue, police, Facebook, Miami, MDPD, Trayvon Martin

We post eight years of video to YouTube every day. We send 200 million tweets per day. And on average, 250 million photos are uploaded each day to Facebook.

As social has moved into the mainstream, public safety has at times embraced it and at other times rejected it as a means of communication with citizens. According to the results of a September 2011 survey conducted by the International Association of Chiefs of Police Center for Social Media, 88.1% of the 800 law enforcement agencies that responded utilize social media in some capacity.

Tags: public safety, social media, #OpPayBack, YouTube, Facebook, 911

Terrorist groups seemed to be all over the Web in 2011. There were al-Qaida videos on YouTube, Facebook pages by Islamic militants in Somalia and webzines — like Inspire — produced by al-Qaida affiliates in Yemen.

If there were an award for the best known terrorist music recording in the past couple of years, it would probably go to the Somali militia group al-Shabab for a YouTube video that extolled the virtues of jihad, or holy war.

Tags: Somalia, counterterrorism, terrorist, Jihad, Jihadist, al-Qaeda, Twitter, Facebook, social media and terrorism, terrorism

"Today, about 90 percent of organized terrorism on the internet is being carried out through the social media," says Professor Gabriel Weimann of the University of Haifa.

"By using these tools, the organizations are able to be active in recruiting new friends without geographical limitations."

According to Professor Weimann, terrorist organizations are taking advantage of Facebook, chat rooms, YouTube, Myspace and other sites.

"The social media is enabling the terror organizations to take initiatives by making ‘Friend’ requests, uploading video clips, and the like, and they no longer have to make do with the passive tools available on regular websites," he says.

Such groups are also taking advantage of social networks as a way of gathering intelligence, says Weimann, with Hezbollah monitoring the Israeli army’s Facebook activity. Indeed, many countries, including the USA, Canada and the UK, have ordered soldiers to remove personal information from Facebook in case Al Qaeda's monitoring it.

"Facebook has become a great place to obtain intelligence. Many users don’t even bother finding out who they are confirming as ‘Friend’ and to whom they are providing access to a large amount of information on their personal life," says Weimann.

"The terrorists themselves, in parallel, are able to create false profiles that enable them to get into highly visible groups."

And for terror organizations, he claims, social media is a chance to  share ‘professional’ information, with terrorists openly swapping information on how to create bombs.

"The most advanced of Western communication technology is, paradoxically, what the terror organizations are now using to fight the West," Weimann warns.

Tags: Facebook, Twitter, social media and terrorism, terrorism

The New York Times reports the State Department said they are “looking closely” at the militant group’s use of its Twitter account, @HSMPress, which it began using Dec. 7.

The account’s bio says, “Harakat Al-Shabaab Al Mujahideen is an Islamic movement that governs South & Cen. Somalia & part of the global struggle towards the revival of Islamic Khilaafa.” In the past two weeks, @HSMPress has sent nearly 120 tweets and amassed more than 5,300 followers. Almost all of the posts are in English, suggesting they are intended primarily for a non-Somali audience.

Many of their tweets emphasize the group’s fight against the Kenyan military, who entered Somalia in October to battle the Shabab.

The Obama administration’s concern, however, is recruitment of new militants, the Times reports, not Kenyan provocation. Mashable has asked the State Department for comment and will update the story if we learn more.

In the account’s early days, the bulk of its followers were journalists, terror researchers and aid workers, not Muslim youth interested in joining the movement, Wired reported.

Since the Times‘s report, the Shabab has responded to of the U.S. government’s concern over its account

The Shabab’s embrace of Twitter is ironic in its own right, considering the group is infamous for its rejection of all things western, keeping foreign aid from reaching famine victims and banning signs of culture — from music to bras — from the regions it controls.

The group has pledged allegiance to Al-Qaeda, and is known for tactics such as cutting off hands, starving the Somali population amid famine and ripping gold teeth out of mouths.

Whether or not the U.S. government chooses to shut down the Shabab’s Twitter account, it opens a larger discussion. Does the U.S. government have the right to shut down social media accounts? Twitter is an American company. Does that give the U.S. sovereignty over the entirety of its content? Share your reactions in the comments.

Tags: Shabab, Somalia, Facebook, Twitter, social media and terrorism

By Jennifer Lipman, January 3, 2012

Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, who specialises in cases against terror groups, criticised the social networking site for allowing such organisations to use the site and said that the company could be violating US law.

In a letter to the company's CEO, Richard Costolo, she suggested that allowing terrorist groups to use the site constituted "the type of seemingly innocuous material support that would render [Twitter] personally criminally and civilly liable".

Although Hizbollah does not have an official Twitter account, the al-Manar television network, which it controls, has 7,500 followers. Groups such as Hamas also use the site either through officials or proxy accounts.

Ms Darshan-Leitner is one of the founders of the Shurat HaDin law firm. Last year Shurat HaDin lawyers claimed a key part in stopping the second Gaza flotilla last year by warning the boat insurers that they could be charged with "aiding terrorism".

Twitter is not the only form of social media to face criticism for not challenging racist or antisemitic activity online. There have been numerous calls for Facebook to clamp down on this, including by Shurat HaDin.

The issue was also raised in the US Congress last week by former vice-presidential candidate Joe Lieberman. Senator Lieberman, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee, called for Twitter to block the accounts of feeds that glorified Taliban attacks on NATO troops in Afghanistan.

Tags: jerusalem, Afghanistan, NATO, taliban, Senate Homeland Security Committee, Joe Lieberman, Congress, Shurat HaDin, Facebook, Gaza, Hamas, al-Manar television network, Hizbollah, Richard Costolo, counterterrorism, terrorism, terrorist, social media and terrorism, Twitter, Nitsana Darshan-Leitner