Daniel Henniger has a good column on the way American born technology is helping spread freedom around the world:

Not that long ago, in 1989, the world watched demonstrators sit passively in Tiananmen Square and fight the authorities with little more than a papier-mâché Statue of Liberty. Poland’s Solidarity movement had to print protest material with homemade ink made from oil because the Communist government confiscated all the printers’ ink.

In 2004, in Ukraine’s Independence Square, they had cell phones.

Using the phones’ SMS messaging technology, demonstrators sent messages to meet to 10 or so friends, who’d each SMS the message to 10 more friends, and so on. It’s called “smart-mobbing.”

Frankly, I think the time has come for overt military planning to be conjoined with smart mobbing. Imagine smart mobs, moving around a city in a manner coordinated with air strikes from above. Such a smart mob war would enable peoples to liberate themselves without any American ground presence. American military planners, using their eyes in the sky, could send out instructions like “take this building” or “avoid this area” and then deliver air strikes that would aid the smart mob in taking over their government. We could use existing cell phone devices for this, or single use devices, built and distributed just for this purpose. And we would call such a war a “Smart Mob War”.

Frankly, I think we need a smart mob war in Iran.

Read Daniel Henniger.
Visit SmartMobs.com.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 17th, 2004 at 11:54 am and is filed under News & Politics, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.