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NATO Leveraging Twitter for Airstrikes in Libya

Wired: “In the early days of the Libya war, U.S. commanders were adamant that they didn’t communicate with the Libyan rebels about what targets to bomb. As it turns out, they don’t need to. They’ve got Twitter. NATO officials conducting air strikes on forces loyal to Moammar Gadhafi don’t have soldiers on the ground to spot for the warplanes and armed drones overhead. (Well, at least not officially.) But they do have a barrage of tweets about Gadhafi’s troop movements in beleaguered cities like Benghazi and Tripoli, all of which come in handy when picking out targets. “We get information from open sources on the Internet, we get Twitter,” British Wing Commander Mike Bracken told AFP. Another NATO official attested, “Twitter is a great source.” None of which is to say that an errant tweet is enough to launch a Hellfire missile. NATO flies AWACS surveillance planes over Libya, as well as other spy aircraft and satellites, to aid with targeting. NATO officials assure that they don’t just set targeting coordinates based on what someone says over Twitter — just that Twitter has value as a source of tactical intelligence.”

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