Terrorist technology

Christopher Dickey's article in Newsweek is worthy of a resounding cry of WTF!?!

Revolution 2.0
The Obama campaign developed powerful Web tools that might shape government but are more likely to build opposition movements, revolutions and possibly terrorist cells.

[...]

The Internet has always been just as open to purveyors of hate as it is to those who promise hope. It is not an ideology or ethos. It's a collection of tools for communication – and for organization and mobilization – that anyone can use. Al Qaeda discovered that a long time ago. [...]

What concerns me here is that the Obama campaign has now shown the world, bad guys as well as good guys, the state of the art. This isn't criticism and certainly wasn't the intent, but it's unavoidable. And while the president-elect's supporters talk about using the Web to build his democratic government, what experience has shown us so far is that the model is most effective when it is used by the forces of opposition, by outsiders. [...]

Dickey's article is primarily about the proposition that the Obama transition team is changing the focus of their web-based activity now that they're a government-in-waiting. Why he feels the need to link this story to the dubious proposition that terrorists are picking up organisational tips from the Obama web site is beyond me. Presumably by his logic the US forces occupying Iraq should adopt the most counterproductive tactics possible, lest they reveal to the terrorists how to forge mutually beneficial relationships with the locals and leave the country in a better state than it was when they found it.¹

[Via delicious/foreignpolicy]

1. Hey! Wait a minute… ↩