The near 60-year history of counterintelligence has been one of having no one in charge of the enterprise. The CI community is not organized or integrated to accomplish a national mission.

Rather, the various CI elements are part of a loose confederation of independent organizations with narrower and varying responsibilities, jurisdictions and capabilities.”

—Michelle Van Cleave

The Twitter social networking site became an international political football this week when the State Department deemed it so valuable in keeping the world abreast of conditions in Iran, that it asked Twitter to postpone a scheduled update and remain online.

The Islamic Republic first tried to control public dissent over suspicious election results by the old-school method of stifling journalists, but they were choking an already dying media and making their own situation worse by helping the decentralized alternative to mushroom.

This has led to a new kind of intelligence and counterintelligence activity, where the role of the “mule” is played by the Internet-astute in their offices, studies and bedrooms; an elaborate cat and mouse game, where Iranian Twitter users tweet information, that information is then repeated by others outside the reach of Iranian control, and the original tweets are deleted by the Iranians who originally posted them.

It’s accelerated the evoution of the citizen journalist, because when you remove the real source because you fear for their safety, you take the burden of the credibility of the content on your own shoulders. A lot of people are coming of age in this sudden change: the Iranian students whose bravery is an inspiration to the world, and the responsible users of the social media networks that are trying to help them by reading the shadows half a world away.

Like so many others twits tethered to computers and net-aware devices by business or obsession, I dabbled with Spymaster from its “beta” days through roll out. It was easy to keep it running on a browser deep in a window stack on a powerful computer. I could click away at it until my virtual energy was depleted, building up cash and virtual weaponry not quite knowing what the right or wrong answers were, figuring things out as I went along.

There wasn’t much there there, but that didn’t matter; I didn’t have much “here” to give it. But then the unfolding events in Iran made the whole thing silly. It just seemed far more productive to spend my free ponder time trying to figure out what to retweet as truth and what to publicly question as disinformation, than figuring out which safehouse to buy and which weapon to sell to buy something more powerful.

There’s a lack of clear goals and strategy in Spymaster that suddenly was supplanted by a real world situation that I could play some small part in from the safety of my real-yet-virtual viewport on it. I could leverage what knowledge I have of the tubes to some real advantage; because out there in the streets of Tehran people are dying for an idea that is only hinted at in Spymaster.

When people are putting their lives on the line for real values and a laudable goal, it just seems silly to play with virtual weaponry when sneaking the right words past Iran’s oppressors could make some small difference.

UPDATE [4:05 AM Tehran Time]: I’ve just been identified on Twitter as an “Iranian Government Account.” This is a tremendous compliment, as it comes from a twitter user (@Persian_Guy) that is almost certainly an Ahmadinejad disinformation entity.

When William Randolph Hearst was the current incarnation of the devil we today call Rupert Murdoch, his premier columnist was one Westbrook Pegler. Books have been written about Pegler damning him with faint praise, and there’s no lack of material to trash him. He started as a sports reporter and columnist, then moved to politics becoming the chief attacker of FDR. He was, for his day, O’Reilly, Hannity and Limbaugh all rolled into one.

Time soured Pegler; he became a rabid anti-Semite and early proponent of the John Birch Society. But he was by all accounts a great writer. He was like Andrew Sullivan on steroids; somebody who could take a totally distasteful political theory and delight you with his description of it. His wit was lethal; he inspired the quote, “It feels good to have your throat slit by a professional.”

I wish I had him back for just a day, or even a small measure of his talent to describe what’s happened to the folks who sponsor the #tcot and #p2 Twitter hashtags. He was at his best when describing people in shouting matches with each other over meaningless fine points and irrelevant details. Even he might not be up to the task.

Hashtags are short tag descriptors that Twitter users include in their tweets so that downstream search engines and applications can perform automated categorizations. Both the left and the right have gotten into pissing contests in the last two weeks over what terms should be used, who may use them, and what they should mean.

Pegler would probably use a card game as metaphor. He liked those. Just when the players worked out what the winning hands were, and what all the chip colors meant, new players would arrive. They’d argue with the old players endlessly but then that argument would be eclipsed when even more players would show up with their own chairs, sit at the table and throw in a new deck of cards.

These twin catfights didn’t arise from conservatives being more anxious to monetize hashtags and website membership than liberals, or liberals unable to decide if good is enemy to the best or vice versa. Its because the players don’t own the card table, or the card room, or the game, nor do they make the rules. Twitter does that by allowing anybody to use #tcot and #p2 for anything they want, and unless that changes, we’re all arguing over the ownership of something we don’t own in the first place.

As a self-professed new media expert on Twitter, I’m expected to have at least one “next big thing” social media idea, but I’m so edgy that I’ve got two.

Twitter has now reached its late teens (in social media years) and has begun the process of cleaning up its childish things. It recently announced that it would start cancelling and reassigning moribund accounts.

Somebody who took a valuable username, tweeted one tweet and wandered off in a daze shouldn’t be a dog-in-the-manger for someone who would put that enviable 3-character moniker to good use.

That’s where my new social networks come in: two new sites designed to keep flakes from frittering away the valuable naming resources and web real estate of the big guys.

These are gateway networks, one each for Twitter and Facebook. New users who don’t pass a simple online Web 2.0 proficiency test at Twitter and Facebook are sent to my two networks for their trial runs.

I call them Fritter and Flakebook.

The Great Influenza by John M. Barry is suddenly shooting up on the sales lists. As I write this, its #20,474 at Barnes & Noble, and has hit #3,009 at Amazon. Meanwhile at Twitter “Swine Flu” is trending and some of the comments are scarier than the potential porcine pandemic itself.

Between those with smug security because they don’t eat pork, to those who brag that fear fatigue from 8 years of color-coded panic has desensitized them to any threat, we’ve got a crucible that could concentrate this possible pandemic instead of prepare us for it.

There are lots of reasons to read Barry’s book. Even if this flu mutates into mild in the next few days or weeks (which is at least as possible as a pandemic), The Great Influenza tells far more than the story of virii. It describes how the allopaths rose to power in world medicine, and the abysmal state of medical schools and medical research in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century.

But it concentrates on the many diverse factors that came together to make the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-1920 the deadliest plague in recent history. WWI moved mass populations and housed them in close quarters.  These were often people who had no history of travel and therefore little or no exposure to a wide range of virii. This was the powderkeg but a chance mutation was the spark.

In all these intervening years with all our gained knowledge we have also been filling up a new powderkeg. Though most have much greater general immunities, some of our population does not. Our international globetrotting on jets may more than overcome our increased immunity.

But in many ways we’re far better prepared. We have an international media presence that can warn a public in minutes that used to take weeks or months, along with this we also have an international well of gossip and misinformation that travels at the speed of light. If this is in fact a pandemic, we may have to deal with fear broadcast by people who believe swine flu comes from bacon, or that a neighbor’s cough is an act of domestic terrorism.

As we’ve recently seen, Twitter and similar social media can be nothing more than a giant international mood swing or a great force for good, especially when wielded by people whose <140 is backed up by the shared knowledge we’ve gained in the four pandemics we’ve suffered in the last 110 years.

A letter to the editor received from a young reader:

I am 8 years old.
Some of my friends say there is no Twitter Pro.
Papa says, if you see it on THE INTERNETS it's so.
Please tell me the truth; is there a Twitter Pro?

VIRGINIA O'HANLON
115 West Ninety-Fifth Street

VIRGINIA, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except what Apple and Microsoft tell them.

Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Twitter Pro. It exists as certainly as user entry form mockups and vaporware and unfunded startups exist, and you know that they abound as dead and moribund webpages on servers this whole world round.

Not believe in Twitter Pro? You might as well not believe in boo.com, or etoys.com or Webvan.

You might get your papa to hire men to watch Source Forge night and day, but even if they didn’t see beta versions coming down the pipe, what would that prove?  Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

No Twitter Pro? Unfathomable. Because VIRGINIA if we tell ourselves that Twitter Pro is nothing but a fairy tale, if we come to believe its just a hoax on the unsuspecting, then we must again ask ourselves that much scarier and vexing question: “How can Twitter monetize itself.”

The Editor

[Snark Rosetta Stone: "Twitter Pro" was an April Fools Joke promulgated by the folks who brought you the Shorty Awards. It was an alleged invitation to participate in the beta program for a rumored paid enhanced service on Twitter that would monetize it. But it really was nothing more than a website that took your twitter avatar and put a "PRO" banner on it, and sent you to your twitter page to replace your avatar with the "enhanced" one. It then let you tweet an invitation to others. A lot of people were fooled, and I was one of them.]

The text message, the rise of IM and Twitter have helped spawn a new argot of phrases shortened to acronyms or words transliterated to letter-number combinations (H8 for hate, 4 instance) or pictographs (<3 for love). In some ways it’s become a cant, but one influenced primarily by the nature of the delivery medium not by the clique developing and adopting it.

But its far from the first time this has happened. The telegraph was an innovation that, for its time, was as revolutionary as the Internet, and it gave rise to a clique that spoke a new language that was as modern as the discovery of electrical current that enabled the telegraph to work.

A whole new set of acronyms were developed, many of them shorthands that described the telegraphy process itself. There were jokes that arose from the way words appeared when they were converted to dots and dashes. There was power in being the first one who knew how the world changed day to day, and in being trusted to know everybody’s business, because you could send a secret telegram, but you had to tell the telegrapher.

Those who spoke this new electric language through their telegraph keys had a bond that elevated them in late 19th and early 20th century society, and many of them became the movers and shakers who would shape the rest of the 20th century, and at the rise of telegraphy nobody saw this coming.

We are in a period of great communications change.  On January 7, 2006, Western Union delivered its last telegram. What was once the paradigm of the important message became meaningless in a world awash in instantaneous worldwide data connectivity. In December of that year, the FCC dropped its requirement that amateur radio operators must pass a Morse Code proficiency exam.

Though we’re losing our legacy communications systems: newspapers dying, radio broadcasting its death rattle, there is tremendous comfort that even as we develop new systems we’re for the most part not making things up as we go along. We’ve been here B4.

CUL 73 CL

Shortly after the 1950s became the 60s, I was one of those geeky kids who read Popular Electronics and took gadgets apart to see how they made their magic. I got in just on the end of that period where a big part of  Popular Mechanics was how wonderful the future, driven by science and engineering, was going to be.

I hit the tail end of that period; things became more noir starting in the 50s. We became xenophobic. Superman’s fight for “Truth, justice and tolerance,” in the comics became “truth, justice and the American Way” when it moved to television. And then we became downright cynical. Donald Fagen mocked it all, with his great lyrics for I.G.Y. A song set in 1957-58 about how wonderful things would be in 1976.

Here at home well play in the city
Powered by the sun
Perfect weather for a streamlined world
There’ll be spandex jackets one for everyone.

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

………………………………… –from IGY – Donald Fagen

I’ve been watching TED videos since shortly after they first came online. I’ve always loved them, and always learned, but this year it was different. The election of President Obama has restored science and reason to public policy. It no longer must hold equal footing with the assertion that Adam & Eve rode dinosaurs. We are not afraid of stem cells. We’re not afraid to hope.

Following the tweets from the many on Twitter who attended, and then watching the videos as they’re released from this years’ TED conference has brought me back to the way I felt reading the pop science and engineering magazines of my childhood.

I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. The presenters allude to it or say it directly in their presentations. The audiences erupt in spontaneous applause when they do. I’d guess that if you’re reading this blog, you’d feel that way too, and if you aren’t following TED, you’re missing out. They’re available as video podcasts on I-Tunes and through other “delivery mediums near you.”

It wasn’t but 20 years ago, we were dumping ASCII messages from BBS to BBS in the dead of the night. Today we send text messages instantaneously to hundreds of thousands of the likeminded and follow it up with high quality video.

We can leverage technology to escape our predicaments. We can develop energy industries that can save us from paying oil rich countries while simultaneously giving us a valuable export.

We can find ways to teach our children better, and use our knowledge to better understand the world and help it solve its problems, which will restore our tattered image oversees.

The Internet has shrunk the world to nearly manageable size, and our search for other worlds and in the ancient history of our own has shown us how much there is left to explore and learn. Some may disagree, but I think its a wonderful thing that with a few clicks of the mouse, you can find I.G.Y. as done by a Japanese cover band.

Back when game shows were as simple as three people, a spartan set and a couple of cameras, You Bet Your Life featured the witty Groucho Marx, announcer George Feneman, and a mustached prop duck that was flown on a pully up above the lights. At the start of the show a “secret word” was announced sotto voce by Feneman, but kept secret from the contestant.

If the contestant said the secret word, which was usually a common but random word that had little to do with the game or the contestant’s life, they got an extra $100.

A stagehand lowered the duck into view of the camera and contestant. The duck had a hundred dollar bill in its beak. (Big money gameshows–and in those days big money was $64,000–didn’t come along for a few years).

Today, I got followed on Twitter by @diabetesnews, whom I didn’t follow back. I don’t have any war with @diabetesnews (or diabetes either, at least yet) and if I were diabetic or involved as a caregiver to someone who was, I might have sought them out. Its good information, in a reasonable amount, well linked.

But what troubles me about this is that I probably got selected because of an offhand snarky comment I made back to @WillPao over his “What age does it become inappropriate to eat Lucky Charms.” It was my answer, I suspect, that got me the follow: “The day you’re diagnosed with Type II diabetes. ”

Maybe I’m just being tech paranoid, and since I made my tweets public, I can hardly be outraged that people follow me. There could me other reasons, and I DM’d @DiabetesNews to inquire. But what worries me is the possibility that it was a bot that made this choice on the basis of a random, offhand remark. I said the secret word, and the duck came down.

I’ve come to love Twitter, which has supplanted other services and software. Its become my tip service, which I tune by deciding whom I follow and hoping that the right people follow me back so that I can return the favor in interest areas I watch closely.

Therefore losing followers and dumping people I follow is probably a good thing. Others are deciding that my content isn’t tuned to their life, or somebody else out there is doing a better job, and gaining followers isn’t necessarily a good thing, because if they picked me because of what I say and what I think, there’s a high probably I’ll like them just as much and will follow back. The incoming stream is already bigger than I’d like.

As Twitter matures, there will be more and more refinement in the art of finding the right mix. Atherton Bartelby’s Mashable post on Follow Fail is an excellent example. We’ve already had the first great security breech, and those of us who didn’t think security was an overriding concern (I mean, its just little txt messages) have been taken to the virtual woodshed.

What we don’t need, is an environment where every tweet is processed by sea of algorithms run by a world-wide collection of special interest groups,  and each day your last few days of tweets are reflected in a wagon-load of tangential follows.

Twitter is at a critical juncture, between security issues, the right mix of commercialization vs. pure social interaction, and just plain too much success. I wish them nothing but luck. They’ve got some serious problems on the horizon, but they’ve also got a lot of users out here who think they’re cooler than a mustached duck with a hundred dollar bill in its beak.

I got my report from Mr. Tweet today. If tweeting, Twitter and and the whole concept of social networking with an extensible API is foreign: the short version is its a way to drop 140-character messages into a virtual world where people who “follow” you see them almost immediately and others can search and find.

I knew about Twitter just from the background noise of the net, but when Tim Elliott of Winecast sent me an invitation, I accepted, even though I couldn’t see any benefit to it. Twitter just seemed silly. But I also knew Elliott was a smart and talented early adopter. If he liked it, I was probably missing something.

Over the last few weeks, Twitter has demonstrated itself as the next step in this evolution of connectivity, and I am now seeing the new apps that fill in the blanks, like Twitter Grader and Mr. Tweet: virtual appliances that ferret out folks on your wavelength and make it easy to include them in your own staccato-statement world.

And another truth was starting to reveal itself. The more these appliances make suggestions on people to follow, the more often I know who they are, and the more they’re “the usual suspects”–people I know (in a ! IRL way) from my last waystations along the early adopter highway.

Like the #1 suggestion on my first Mr. Tweet report: Robert Scoble. I am already following Dave Winer. Can the prompt to add Adam Curry be far off?

Next will come the wholesale monetization of Twitter, which was deftly avoided by them waving off Facebook’s offer of cash and pseudo-cash, but sooner or later, they’ll take the bait and tweets will suddenly sport more product placement than America’s Biggest Loser.

And that will be my cue to move on down the road, where I’m sure to find all the usual suspects on my next stop along this information superhighway that gets smarter at every turn.