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Technology Focus on Both Sides of the Indian Hostage Crisis

Submitted by: David Caldwell

It seems as if a firestorm of coverage has erupted from India in the past few days: headlines like “Indian Official: Terrorists Wanted to Kill 5,000” and “India Ends Mumbai Rampage After 60 hours, 195 Dead” seem to bring the visceral carnage straight into our living rooms and onto our coffee tables from 13 time zones away. Since the development and distribution of modern satellite and fiber-optic communications matured in the 90’s, information has been pouring back and forth in ever increasing volumes over our tiny blue planet as quickly as relativistic speed limits have allowed. With this ever increasing capacity, we’ve begun to push entire industries abroad to take advantage of lower costs and greater production capabilities. Indeed, even our military has started pushing GPS and communications technologies into the forefront of its offensive and defensive capabilities - replacing battalions of troops and stockpiles of nuclear warheads as its primary deterrent.

On the flip side of this coin has been the quick and cheap dissemination of communications tools to more unscrupulous characters. It came as a shock to Indian commandos that the terrorists involved in this week’s attack were found to be using “Blackberries to Monitor the World’s Response to Their Actions“. According to CNN, “the gunmen were as brazen as they were well trained, using sophisticated weapons, GPS technology and mobile and satellite phones to communicate….they were constantly in touch with a foreign country.” It goes without saying then that access to cheap, ubiquitous communications technology can come as mixed blessing.

Update: Apparently Twitter has gained some popularity in India, and it was used extensively by the people present at the event: Mumbai: Twitter’s Moment