The US Government has revealed more information about the intelligence sources used to find Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan. The terrorist had evaded forces for almost a decade so military officials had begun to look at alternative methods of tracking him down including social networking sites.
A spokesman for the US military said “We originally tried looking on Facebook and MySpace but with no luck. It sounds crazy but we knew Bin Laden liked sharing movie clips so we thought it might be worth a try. Unfortunately he wasn’t on either of those sites and we knew from detailed criminal profiling that he just wasn’t a Bebo kind of guy.”
The breakthrough came when a US soldier Private Benjamin Zimmerman accidentally found him via the location based social networking site Foursquare. Speaking this morning Private Zimmerman explained how he had discovered America’s most wanted. ”Every time I popped out to the local market in Islamabad I’d Foursquare it on my iPhone. It got a bit of an obsession because I’d become mayor of several of the stalls and I was trying to get the lot. Anyway, there was one place that always came up as “Big Oz’s House” and I never really thought about what it was until one day I suddenly realised it’s was Bin Laden’s place. He was right under noses all the time and none of us clocked him.”
With the help of Private Zimmerman’s iPhone US troops were able to monitor and track down Bin Laden, and the Foursquare app provided further intelligence thanks to helpful comments and tips left by Al Qaeda operatives who had visited the compound. Some of these pieces of information including “Use the side gate, the main one is really, really squeaky” and “Big Oz usually goes into the back office for a nap at 3pm so keep the noise down!” are credited with preventing any American soldiers from getting hurt.
So far, there has been no word on whether Private Zimmerman will be decorated for his contribution but he has been allowed to visit the seized compound enough times to become mayor. Today the US military expressed relief that Bin Laden had been eliminated but warned that this wasn’t the end of the story. “We’ve got Bin Laden but remember, he has plenty of followers out there. We’re hoping to get to most of them next week via Twitter.”