Chicago (IL) - In a report published by the US Army’s 304th Military Intelligence Battalion and later posted to the Federation of American Scientists website, the U.S. Intelligence community has labeled Twitter, amongst other Web 2.0-like tools, as potential tools for terrorists to coordinate attacks.

The majority of the report is dedicated to ways that terrorist organizations would be take advantage of current mobile phone technologies. However a chapter entitled “Potential for Terrorist use of Twitter: a Red Teaming Perspective,” outlines a different and somewhat surprising topic.

Much of the early part of the chapter is dedicated to explaining what Twitter is, and examples of how it is used, specifically focusing on the earthquake that occurred in Los Angeles on July 29 of this year. It goes on to describe Twitter’s users as being “socialists, human rights groups, communists, vegetarians, anarchists, religious communities, atheists, political enthusiasts, hacktivists and others…”

the report states that “Twitter is already used by some members to post and/or support extremist ideologies and perspectives,” and pointed to “multiple pro and anti Hezbollah Tweets” as examples of this claim. “In addition,” the report’s authors state, “extremist and terrorist use of Twitter could evolve over time to reflect tactics that are already evolving in use by hacktivists and activists for surveillance. This could theoretically be combined with targeting.”

The report was given from a “Red Teaming” perspective, referring to the intelligence communities Red Teams, who simulate military conflicts in an attempt to reveal weaknesses. Along with the fears posed by Twitter were three Red Team scenarios.