If you think your friends spend too much time on their social media networks, I'm sure it's probably fairly harmless.Unless of course your friend is Mark Taylor.A New Zealander who gave up a comfortable life to become a member of the radical Jihadist group ISIS...who can't stop tweeting.

In the world of a radical jihadist group member, you'd imagine privacy would be a #1 concern.  But when Taylor was having a good time casually tweeting while holed up in Syria, he had no idea he was also sending out his location and the location of his comrades.  Every tweet he sent was being geotagged with his location and started being tracked by numerous intelligence agencies.

The first company to pick up on Taylor's blunder was iBRABO.  As Jameson Parker at Addictinginfo.org writes, “Canadian-based Open Source Intelligence research group that specifically tracks people like Taylor on social media, in the hopes that they screw up and reveal information about their whereabouts and their plans which can then be relayed to counter-terrorism experts.” IBRABO's employee, Jeff R. Weyers explains how it all went down:

“This week one of New Zealand’s well known jihadists, Mark Taylor (Twitter aka: Kiwi Jihadi or @M_Taylor_Kiwi), removed 45 tweets after he discovered that he was broadcasting his twitter location to every intelligence agency (and others) keeping tabs on him. Unfortunately for him we captured all of them prior to him removing the tweets and will discuss the value of the intelligence they contained.”

I guess the saying is true: Keep your friends close and your enemies even closer.

-Mitchell Allen, OTG editorial staff

Watch Jesse's take on the costs of war against ISIS below:

The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of Ora Media, LLC its affiliates, or its employees.

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