Someone or something temporarily shut down Twitter this morning (Facebook was also temporarily disabled). Because of the nature of the attack, “client applications that depend on the Twitter API could also not connect to the service, creating a complete Twitter blackout.”

In response, George Donnelly tweeted about the DDoS attacks on Twitter and Facebook:

RT @MacFaux spooky. Twitter up. Facebook up. That was a test run. Someone wanted to know if they could quiet the tubes.

If you don’t know how to make your own tin-foil hat (to prevent the CIA from reading your brainwaves) or if you’re disinclined to entertain conspiracy theories, consider this fair warning.

MacFaux is right. It is very spooky. Only two groups of people would want to shut down Twitter or Facebook. Only one of those groups of people has any real incentive to do so. Sure, some hacker might get a stiffy because he was able to pwn the intertubes. And yeah, that is kind of neat, I’ll be the first to conced that.

But social-networking sites are going to be the bread-and-butter of 21st century insurgencies. Communications channels like Twitter and Facebook, using minimally affordable technology accessible to all, allow for rapid organization and rapid dissemination of news and information, on scales heretofore inconceivable. This is a significant hurdle for an aspiring police state.

what’s coming is distributed, peer-to-peer, organic, cypherpunk- and crypto-anarchist-created Facebook- and Twitter-like social networking and communication services that support unbreakable hard encryption, market-produced unfalsifiable digital identity management, mathematically guaranteed transactional and locational anonymity by default or at will, untraceable anonymous digital bearer certificate trading networks and, of course, assassination markets.

And when those things launch, they’re going to launch on all channels.

— Can the Military Coexist with Social Networking Sites? NoState.com, 5 Aug., 2009

From Milwaukee to Tehran, governments are learning that this is a powerful force for good. For a government, especially one that’s facing crises of epic proportions and growing unrest, the ability to silence dissent and discoordinate dissenters is real incentive.