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.

A 2008 article in Newsweek says sectarian and politically-motivated violence after the US-led invasion has decimated the health care industry: In Iraq, The Doctors Are Out.

The medical profession in particular has been hollowed out. Iraq’s health-care system used to be the envy of the Arab world. Even in the 1990s, when sanctions and Saddam Hussein’s worsening misrule crippled much of the country, people came from all over the region to study medicine or seek treatment. But after the U.S. invasion, doctors became targets for ransom kidnappings and assassination. Upwards of 120 physicians were killed. Some were gunned down in their own clinics. Things got worse than ever after 2005, when loyalists of the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr gained control of the Health Ministry. Hospitals turned into Shiite militia bases where Sunnis could be killed on sight.

The Sadrists are in retreat now, but the doctors are still missing. The current health minister, Salih Hasnawi, estimates that roughly half the country’s doctors have fled, from a prewar total of as many as 30,000 or more. He says only about 800 health professionals have returned—and that number includes not only doctors but also dentists and pharmacists.

Just 3% of doctors remain after three years. Reversing this trend is complicated by the ongoing threats and violence.

But money alone won’t bring back many doctors. As much as they like higher salaries, what they want is freedom from fear. Just last week, doctors in the southern city of Karbala temporarily closed their clinics, seeking protection from families who threaten violence when their loved ones aren’t cured. The Iraqi cabinet has tried to help medical workers feel safer, even ordering the police to exempt doctors from the law requiring a permit to carry firearms on Baghdad’s streets.

The right to carry arms does not seem like a great incentive, let alone control measure, for the medical profession. It actually seems like a giant loophole that will encourage every terrorist or crook to forge medical papers. I mean even more frightening than a lack of doctors, perhaps, is the impersonation of doctors by terrorists and violent factions to increase their kill ratios. The Independent tells the story about a man who posed as a doctor and then killed dozens of wounded soldiers instead of helping them.

“He was called Dr Louay and when the terrorists had failed to kill a policeman or a soldier he would finish them off,” Colonel Yadgar Shukir Abdullah Jaff, a senior Kirkuk police chief, told The Independent. “He gave them a high dosage of a medicine which increased their bleeding so they died from loss of blood.”

Dr Louay carried out his murder campaign over an eight to nine-month period, say police. He appeared to be a hard working assistant doctor who selflessly made himself available for work in any part of the hospital, which is the largest in Kirkuk.

He was particularly willing to assist in the emergency room. With 272 soldiers, policemen and civilians killed and 1,220 inj

ured in insurgent attacks in Kirkuk in 2005, the doctors were rushed off their feet and glad of any help they could get. Nobody noticed how many patients were dying soon after being tended by their enthusiastic young colleague.

Dr Louay was finally arrested only after the leader of the cell to which he belonged, named Malla Yassin, was captured and confessed.

No one could tell this man was killing the wounded, even though everyone he treated died shortly after he visited them. One can only imagine the damage, and the exodus of his colleagues, if he also was allowed to carry weapons.