“Petitioners knew or should have known that their I.P. information was subject to examination by Twitter, so they had a lessened expectation of privacy in that information, particularly in light of their apparent consent to the Twitter terms of service and privacy policy,” wrote Judge O’Grady of the United States District Court in Alexandria, Va.

While most media outlets chose to look at the story from the standpoint of what it might mean for online privacy rights, David Gewirtz at ZDNet saw it as sending a message to foreign agents potentially working against American interests.

“A member of a foreign government stole information from our government and then used a social network, built, owned, and operated in our country to communicate with her collaborators,” Gewirtz wrote about one of three Twitter users in question, Birgitta Jonsdottir, a current Icelandic member of parliament. “This is not a privacy issue at all. It’s a national security issue and our courts were 100% correct in their determination.”

The man’s body was accompanied by a blood-stained blanket with writing in black ink saying, “Hi I’m ‘Rascatripas’ and this happened to me because I didn’t understand I shouldn’t post things on social networks.” (Per Wired’s translation.)

While fears are obviously apparent, civilians have been encouraged to use social media as a way to notify authorities about cartel whereabouts, actions and violence. Juan Carlos Romero, who helps lead the press freedom group Article 19, told the Associated Press that regular Mexicans turned to monitoring and reporting cartel actions over social media because local newspapers have stopped reporting about local crimes out of fear.

Perhaps more notably, 75 percent said that the government has the right to open access to social network data to prevent crimes. Unsurprisingly, younger adults were more likely to be against such measures and older citizens were more supportive.

The poll by the online security firm Unisys is interesting given a report by The Guardian that pored over 2.5 million Twitter updates. The Guardian‘s study cast doubts on the rationale to ban or restrict the use of social networks, given usage of social media was mostly related to reaction to the riots, not its planning.

What do you think about this poll? Is it right for a government to use social media data to track domestic activity? Should usage of these tools be restricted?

Major Emmanuel Chirchir, the Kenyan Army’s spokesman, has used Twitter to give progress updates about the incursion and at times has used Twitter to name certain towns the army would hit next in hopes of protecting citizens.

There’s a question of how effective this is, given Somalia’s access to the Internet is extremely rudimentary. Internet access limited largely to cities and usually confined to Internet cafes because of cost, according to Abdikadir Ahmed, who has worked on Internet freedom issues in Somalia. Ahmed also said that broader use of social media can help Somalia get out of its decades-long conflicts. He says:

Nowadays, mainly in the cities, you will find Internet cafes. Youth are using Facebook and chatting. If someone posts something on Facebook, there are thousands of people who pass it on. We have plenty of news websites, about 700. But when it comes to blogs, it is something new. In Somalia, we have extremists and moderates. … Social blogs can help Somalis come out with peaceful ways for [dealing with] a conflict that’s been going on for more than 20 years.

Other media outlets added their own analysis of what the latest-known example of social media monitoring in the name of security means. The main takeaway: Expect this sort of practice by government agencies to grow and evolve.

The practice of tracking mass sentiment, dubbed as “memetracking,” is still in its infancy, according to Johan Bollen, a professor at the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University. He told The Atlantic:

“Right now, analysis is very specialized. We’re looking at how people feel about very particular topics. … There’s a lot room for growth in deeper semantic analysis: not just learning what people feel about something, but what people think about things. There are 250 million people on Twitter. … if you could perform even a shallow analysis of people’s opinions about something, their semantic opinions, you can learn a lot from the wisdom of the crowd that could be leveraged.”

Alex Pareene of Salon noted that the CIA news came days after Department of Homeland Security claims that they were not “actively monitoring” social media. He says it’s smart to suspect that several government agencies from the CIA down to the NYPD are monitoring social media. “What I’m interested to learn is how much ostensibly “private” information — like real names and private messages and locations — these agencies are obtaining, and the means by which they’re obtaining it,” Pareene writes.

So basically, this is only the beginning.

The ability to identify patterns and trends in social networks could help the arms control verification process. In the most basic sense, social media can draw attention to both routine and abnormal events. We may be able to use data mining to understand where strange effluents are flowing, to recognize patterns of industrial activity, to queue sensors and satellites. Such queuing could help us to make better use of our scarce and expensive National Technical Means, or in some cases to supplement them in important ways. This is a major issue in an age of budget austerity, when the price tag for big hardware like satellites continues to rise. We need this “big hardware”, but we need to use it efficiently.

She pointed to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Red Balloon Challenge in 2009 as an example of how social media had effectively helped the eventual winners find 10 red balloons placed around the world for a $40,000 cash prize.

The State Department website has Gottemoeller’s speech, in text, here.

Read the full story: W.H. online counterterrorism woes.