Deutsche Welle reports how activists in Egypt are using Twitter to organize and break the grip of authorities.

Amr Ghrabei, one of the pioneers of the cyber dissident scene recalls another famous tweeting incident. At a demonstration in Cairo, the activist Malek Mustafa had been taken away in a police car.

“Thanks to Twitter, different groups of activists kept track of the path the car was taking,” Ghrabei said. From his home computer, the activist published the various Twitter messages on the homepage of the opposition movement Kifava.

“Because of that, they actually managed to surround the police car and finally had Malek released,” added Ghrabei.

Highly distributed communication is a friend of these activists, but every tool like this is double-edged. It will be interesting to see how authorities respond to the organized popular movements. A twitter like “arrested” is a fairly obvious and innocent example of a tweet, but what about cases like “let him have it“?

Wired covers the other side of this story in their Danger Room

“Recognizing that the Taliban tactic is to exaggerate, lie, and create situations that cause civilian casualties, I have attempted to counter that with speed, accuracy and transparency in our reporting,” Col. Greg Julian, the top spokesman for USFOR-A, tells Danger Room.

But the really interesting point is what kinds of information these tools relay. Earlier today, USFOR-A — which is separate from the NATO International Security Assistance Force — used its Twitter page to post a tally of enemy dead. According to the tweet, six militants responsible for attacks in the province were killed in an operation in Wardak Province.

The one-to-many nature of Tweets brings with it convenience such as speed, but is it accurate or trustworthy? Impersonation seems trivial, and there is danger that a trickle of vital facts today that seem like a new form of transparency could easily turn into a firehose of noise with little or no way to filter.

Not to be confused with Pooh surveillance, scientists have found a way to use satellite images of poop to track penguins from space. It begs the question, what are they guano do about it?

In a new study pub­lished this week in the jour­nal Glob­al Ecol­o­gy and Bi­o­ge­og­raphy, sci­en­tists from Brit­ish Ant­arc­tic Sur­vey de­scribe how they used sat­el­lite im­ages to sur­vey the sea ice around 90 per­cent of Ant­arc­ti­ca’s coast to search for em­per­or pen­guin col­o­nies. The sur­vey iden­ti­fied a to­tal of 38. Ten of those were new. Of pre­vi­ously known col­o­nies six had moved and six were not found.

Be­cause em­per­or pen­guins breed on sea ice dur­ing the Ant­arc­tic win­ter lit­tle is known about their col­o­nies. Reddish-brown patches of gua­no, or pen­guin po­o­p, on the ice, vis­i­ble in sat­el­lite im­ages, pro­vide a re­li­a­ble in­dica­t­ion of their loca­t­ion, ac­cord­ing to in­ves­ti­ga­tors.

I remember reading how sanitation plants were sometimes sampled by authorities to get an indication of drug use by area. This seems like a much more interesting and lighthearted example of the kind of crap that surveillance can expose.