“One commando leader described how suspicions of a British link had been raised when investigators examined BlackBerry mobile phones seized from some of the captured Islamic extremists, which they had used to monitor the internet.

General Noble Thamburaj, head of India’s southern command, told the Telegraph: “There was a lot of content from the English media, not just in London but the Urdu and Arabic sites that are very strong in the north of England.”

I found these paragraphs in a Australian news report (http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,24726093-954,00.html):

“However amid the arsenal of military hardware, it was the use of humble mobile phones and internet technology that proved a key weapon – one which caught the anti-terrorist forces by surprise.

The use of BlackBerrys by the terrorists to monitor international reaction to the atrocities, and to check on the police response via the internet, provided further evidence of the highly organised and sophisticated nature of the attacks.”

But nowhere can I find a single attributed quote from anyone in a position to know that this is what the terrorists were doing with their Blackberries. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were, but at this point, it’s still only rumor slipping into news stories as fact from whaat I’ve been able to determine.

What made it _especially_ interesting to me was that I read the article because it was linked in a tweet from a well-known social media analyst (who may end up a research source in my paper), yet I was surprised to discover that this analyst’s description of the article was completely wrong.

In fact, the tweet actually reinforced the “Indian Government asks Twitter users to stop” meme that the CNN article calls into question I’m suspicious that the tweeter may have never read the article at all, but saw the headline and assumed it would tell the received wisdom version of Twitter’s role in Mumbai, which will be the version used in presentations at conferences for the next year. Yet in tweeting the CNN story wrong, the questions the story raises about sourcing and accuracy were effectively highlighted.

When traditional news organizations get the story wrong, we hold them accountable. When amateurs on the scene get the story wrong, what do we do? On what basis am I expected to do my own Shirkian filtering of messages that can be no more than140 characters long and could be coming from anyone anywhere in the world, with any possible motive for sending them? If it seemed plausible that the terrorists might be monitoring Twitter for information on the government’s response, then could it also be plausible that they were using Twitter to spread misinformation?

While I do love the rise of the amateur, I can’t help but fear the consequences of the fall of the professional.