Guy unknowingly live tweets the Osama raid in Abbottabad
tweetlibrary.com
tweetlibrary.com
There are aerial photos of the compound in the briefing obtained by ABC news:
http://abcnews.go.com/images/Politics/Graphics%20for%20backg...
Based on these photos and looking around the area, I've found the actual location of the compound, which exactly matches the photos from the briefing:
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&#...
It's still in the area, but a bit further from the Pakistan Military Academy and in the SW direction from it (not NW, as the Telegraph map claims).
since it is in a city environment such as this neighbors, post-mortems on the building and things like that will likely give us a much better idea about what was going on there.
makes you wish the troops had GoPros, doesn't it?
For all the discussion of business cases for technology like Twitter, let's spare a moment to reflect on how impressive it is in and of itself for this sort of event.
Then again, so many people had their comments down-voted into light gray in the original Osama article that I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of flaggings came from people that wanted to stem their own decline in karma. That would make for an interesting dataset.
But yes, I agree - this is not the main story.
This link, however, is likely the first time in history that something so covert and meticulously planned has been exposed in real-time by someone experiencing it himself. We get the opportunity to see it from his perspective without the media's filters - just raw data. This is incredibly fascinating to me.
I will have to archive this guy's tweet stream when I get home.
This is history, people.
That said, this stream is rather interesting, and it belongs here too.
If there's one thing that I find most useful about HN it's that articles here are constantly making me think about how our world is changing, and what new tools and solutions might enable compelling needs that arise from those changes. Major news events are relevant, and I'm more interested in what HN'ers have to say about them than most other communities I'm a part of.
We don't know how many people flagged that article, whether it was manually pushed down by a moderator etc. All we can guess is that it is artificially moving down because other articles (with much lesser upvotes and same age) are ahead of it.
My request for more transparency (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2495953 ) was itself killed with no transparency :)
Here, someone in close proximity to a reasonably significant historical event used social networks to broadcast his observation of said event. If this has happened before, it hasn't been very many times, and it's undoubtedly been only quite recently. We are witnessing a new historical phenomenon that will undoubtedly be worth a line in a history textbook.
Moreover, importantly, the comments on this article don't completely suck. There's some meta-noise like this, but much less complete political stupidity.
Yes, UBL's death is significant to just about everyone. But it's not really intellectually gratifying or interesting, nor was much of the commentary surrounding it in the previous thread. There was lots of unfocused complaining about fallout from 9/11 including the TSA, DHS, wars, and political changes, but very little of it was new or enlightening. Definitely worthy of a flag.
Here, I find it tremendously interesting to see a (distant) eyewitness account of a significant historical event, given in real time over social media and not filtered by any other entities after the fact. Much more of the commentary here is intellectually gratifying as well. This was worthy of an upvote.
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=osama+bin+laden+&hl=en&...
BONUS: Click "Search Nearby" and enter "PMA Kakul" -- you will see that the Pakistan Military Academy was just a short trip up the road from his house!
PMA on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan_Military_Academy
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/05/video-inside-bin-lad...
The guy unknowingly tweeted but without an official release we wouldn't have known it was Bin Laden so it wouldn't have become that important.
One helicopter was lost due to "technical failure". The team destroyed it and left in its other aircraft.
And even if they really destroyed it themselves at the end, that also speaks a lot about the circumstances there. Pakistan government is supposed to support U.S. but the helicopter has to be destroyed, obviously to keep it from failing in the hands of Al Quaeda. It's more than interesting.
the carcass of the helicopter is sitting out in a field all blown up. it is on pakistani tv. i doubt they would have even thought about trying to cover that up
How is this not "state secrets" ?
If they do not prosecute him for the leak, it's a double-standard.
http://twitter.com/keithurbahn/status/64989522378764288
it wasn't a 'state secret' at that point
besides, i thought most people here supported government leaks of this kind not being treason/state secrets/whatever
> The news that Osama bin Laden had been killed (...) was broken via Twitter (...).
> (...) credit for the leak went to Keith Urbahn, the chief of staff for Donald Rumsfeld (...)
Mr. Urbahn quickly added, “Don’t know if it’s true, but let’s pray it is.” He was credited by many on the Web with breaking the news, though he did not have first-hand confirmation.
Within minutes, anonymous sources at the Pentagon and the White House started to tell reporters the same information. ABC, CBS and NBC interrupted programming across the country at almost the same minute, 10:45 p.m., with the news. “We’re hearing absolute jubilation throughout government,” the ABC News correspondent Martha Raddatz reported.
Seems like the leak was planned, or at least, unpreventable.
"Hey, this special President speech tonight... this mood, is it Osama?"
silence
The media guys then call up every old defence contact they have, old generals, the like, who probably got the news a little earlier. They get something, and run with it.
Things don't need to 'leak', sometimes the gravity and mood just tells the story.
Isn't that what reporters do?
> Twitter and such make distributing all of the relevant facts happen that much faster
Twitter certainly makes distributing all of the relevant facts happen that much faster. It also makes distributing misinformation faster.
I've been doing a startup for years and I never made it to front page of HackerNews, TechCrunch, NY Observer and many other hot places at the same time.
I've advised him to launch a product ASAP. Its gonna be hot and I'm definitely gonna invest :P
Poor guy. I feel sorry for him, the sudden fame must be an unpleasant shock.
To contrast all this, we have Zuck at facebook providing smooth stable leadership that can clearly be seen in how fb as a product has scaled and evolved. Twitter meanwhile may be scaling and sue that can require significant effort - but as a product in year five, it's a relative fail for the hype and valuation.
Twitter seems to be a bit different in that regard.
IMO user engagement is one of twitter's biggest issues.
As it stands right now, twitter is a great tool for journalist research and other niche research. That's been true for a few years now. The problem is twitter has done little to break beyond it OR to completely own that space. It's similar to if facebook never really broke out of its college roots or had high account abandonment rates for non-college crowd. Both of those were proven wrong for fb; fb long ago made critical product decisions to break beyond college(such as complete removing course listings) and working country by country to ensure penetration and engagement.
Twitter is more akin to a real time, universal log + interactions, but it doesn't come with a central studio that sifts through the materials and gives you the good stuff. If you don't know where to look, for most it will always be a hindsight experience.
For me personally, that was far more satisfying than hearing about it via "traditional" sources. (Including Reddit.)
The benefit to CNN is that almost every household had/has access to CNN. It's some channel on basic cable, even if you didn't regularly watch it, it was easy to find and was pushing the same news out to everyone.
Twitter on the other hand is not as simple to just start using. You need to sign up, and then find the right people to follow (granted, Twitter does try to make this easier), but for any given event it's hard to find in real time a tweetstream that is going to be better than just watching CNN or other major news outlet. On top of that, Twitter is filled with parody accounts, people making stuff up, and lots of other noise.
Yes, conceptually a lot of people have access to Twitter. However, from a practicality standpoint my personal opinion is that it's not very effective tool for a scenario like this.
Interesting. Can you provide links?
Edit: According to harshpotatoes I am wrong, so please disregard this.
The White House transcript "Press Briefing by Senior Administration Officials on the Killing of Osama bin Laden" mentions that the raid happened 'earlier this afternoon'
SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Thank you. Earlier this afternoon, a small U.S. team conducted a helicopter raid on the compound.
"Muslim tradition requires burial within 24 hours, but by doing it at sea, American authorities presumably were trying to avoid creating a shrine for his followers." [http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/02/world/asia/osama-bin-laden...]
"It was 3:50 on Sunday afternoon when President Obama received the news that Bin Laden had tentatively been identified, most likely after a series of DNA tests." [http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/02/world/asia/02reconstruct-c...]
This is exactly what the Israelis did with Eichmann.
Another article said that the burial at sea was completed by 2 AM EDT (so they presumably were done by 3 PM in Pakistan, about 14 hours after the first tweet).
Today's news are more accurate on that matter: "At 2:05 p.m., Mr. Panetta sketched out the operation to the group for a final time. Within an hour, the C.I.A. director began his narration, via video from Langley. “They’ve crossed into Pakistan,” he said." [http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/03/world/asia/03intel.html?pa...]
where did you get that from? Every story mentions DNA samples being taken, measurements, photos, video etc. while the body was in Afghanistan
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/02/us-binladen-dna-id...
"Results of the DNA tests should be available in the next few days, the official told Reuters"
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/2011/05/201152619612164...