ACCIDENTALLY OPEN INTELLIGENCE:

From Abbottabad, Live-Tweeting the bin Laden Attack (Shefali Anand, 5/02/11, WSJ)

A man in Abbottabad, the town where Osama bin Laden was killed by the U.S. on Monday, inadvertently live-tweeted the attack as it started.

The man, who uses the Twitter handle “ReallyVirtual”, identifies himself as Sohaib Athar, “an IT consultant taking a break from the rat-race by hiding in the mountains with his laptops.”

Around 11 hours ago, according to the Twitter timeline, Mr. Athar first tweeted about a helicopter hovering above him at 1 a.m., saying it was a “rare event” for Abbottabad. That would have been at about 3.30 p.m. Eastern time on Sunday.

Still, Mr. Athar seems to have thought of it as a mere annoyance, as his next tweet was “Go away helicopter – before I take out my giant swatter :-/”

Within minutes, he tweeted: “A huge window shaking bang here in Abbottabad Cantt. I hope its not the start of something nasty :-S”.

After a while when the sound of the helicopter stopped following a blast, Mr. Athar tweeted “seems like my giant swatter worked !” [...]

As the Twitter world discovered Mr. Athar’s live tweets from last night, thousands of followers have added him in the last few hours.

Two hours ago, he wrote: “Uh oh, now I’m the guy who liveblogged the Osama raid without knowing it.”

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