Last week I’d decided to make some brief notes regarding social media being used as a source of news during the Mumbai attacks. This week, the ongoing demonstrations in Tehran gave us new food for thought. As a result, I’ve recorded more links in the past few days than I can comfortably make it through. This isn’t meant in the pejorative, but because of the nature of social media and the nature of online journalism, many of them are saying the same things.

So, while I won’t be doing the usual (and blogish) synopsis / blockquote / my two cents for all of these, I will republish a few links for reference before playing devil’s advocate.

• Wikipedia entry regarding the attacks themselves.
• Synopses of the use of social media to report the attacks: Telegraph, Danger Room.

Is it possible – and, if so, worthwhile – to evaluate the effects of on the fly reportage via twitter, flickr? Why do we assume that access to this information is a good thing? I am not arguing against this assumption – in fact, it is probably one of the assumptions underlying much of my behavior– but assumptions need to be questioned. For example, can we imagine a scenario in which attackers are able to identify victims because of their tweets, or avoid antagonists (i.e. law enforcement) because of information in tweets? Just because governments and militaries imagine these situations on our behalf, and may use them to rationalize controlling the media does not mean that we should act as if these possibilities don’t exist.

We know that the Mumbai attackers used a variety of commercially available tech to plan and pull off the attacks, a worthy subject of study in itself, and yet I seem to hear far more about the tweets of observers. Perhaps that was the first hint of this weeks so-called #CNNfail, but the accusation implied in that hashtag seems to rest on the assumption that it is possible for an organization like CNN to compete with everyone. It isn’t. Queue broken record re: open source, stigmergy, whatever.

There also seems to be an overwhelming sense of technological positivism about regarding social media. Yes, its great that social media can facilitate demonstrations (provided, of course, that those demonstrations fall in line with our sclerotic middle-class hipsterism), but can’t it also facilitate lynchings? Can’t it also just spread disinformation? Isn’t it value neutral? Or is that assumption akin to a “guns don’t kill people, people kill people argument?” in it’s not technically incorrect and yet really rather worthlessness?

Interesting scenario via ThreatChaos:

The amount of traffic on Twitter and the number of people spreading the word about DDoS efforts points to a scenario that has not been explored before. Internet meltdown from social upheaval.

Via Shlok Vaida

In November of last year, when I was pulling a gargoyle (Snow Crash) and providing real time analysis of events unfolding in Mumbai, user levels were such that it was still manageable for readers to rely on the flow + hash tags. However, the tripling of traffic (partly due to that coverage) has made the presentation layer obtuse and burdensome (essentially useless). The signal to noise ratio is extremely low.

Abu Muqawama

… another observation that came out of the Moldova protests was this maxim: Live by Twitter, Die by Twitter. Social networking technology like Twitter, Facebook and cellular phones allows all kinds of new capabilities — such as the ability to call for a flash mob outside parliament on 30 minutes notice, far too quick for the authorities to respond. But what happens when the state simply shuts down all wireless networks? Or bans Facebook? Now what are you going to do?”

More via Danger Room.

Where is all of this heading? After all, my goal its to try and define the larger subject of network disruption and its relationship to digital media, ICT and infrastructure. Next time I hope to start looking at some of Leysia Palen’s research into crisis informatics.

added June 17:

Wanted to add an excerpt from this interview with Jim Cowie, which appeared on the FP NetEffect blog this morning.

Yes, as I implied in the blog, attacks cause congestion. Simple attacks, like the automatic reloaders, mimic heightened levels of real user interest. You send a small HTTP request, and the page contents are streamed to you. Each page they serve consumes domestic bandwidth. From the sound of things, the regime may have deliberately created artificial domestic bandwidth scarcity, in an attempt to reduce the number of people who can use the Internet without taking it down entirely. Because of the diversity of the domestic transit market (there are dozens of ISPs big and small), the regime is almost certainly imposing these bandwidth restrictions at the central chokepoints through which data must flow — that is, near the core of the domestic Internet, represented by Data Communications Iran, not out near the edge (individual providers). The struggle for transit capacity becomes a zero-sum game, because of the requirement that domestic providers come to a central place (DCI) for their international bandwidth and to exchange traffic with each other. In other words, if you attack a pro-government site, you are almost certainly also stealing bandwidth from pro-opposition sites.

…

As interesting as the “government encouraging DDOS” hypothesis would be, I don’t buy it. The Iranian internet infrastructure is still centralized enough that if the government wants to make the Internet unusable domestically, or turn it off entirely, they have the tools to make it happen; they don’t have to recruit you and me to do it for them. Even more compellingly, remember that Iran pays cold hard currency for all the Internet traffic they have to ship to the wider world on one of their six international carrier connections. Every megabit of internationally-sourced DDOS traffic costs them money. There are cheaper ways to break the Internet.

Also, a nice overview of everything here at wanabehuman (h/t Tim Stevens at Ubiwar).