The Army has ordered its network managers to give soldiers access to social media sites like Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter, Danger Room has learned. That move reverses a years-long trend of blocking the web 2.0 locales on military networks.

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A Moldovan activist faces criminal charges for organizing demonstrations that were enabled by social-networking tools like Twitter and Facebook, the Russian press reports.

In an interview with Russian news agency ITAR-TASS, Moldovan Prosecutor General Valeriu Gurbulea said Natalia Morar, one of the organizers of an anti-Communist flash mob, has been officially charged with “calls for organizing and staging mass disturbances.” (Morar has not been put in jail, however–despite some reports to the contrary.)

Prosecutors, Gurbulea added, were contemplating charges against another 200 people he described as being involved in an attempt to overthrow the government in Moldova’s so-called “Twitter Revolution.”

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Last August, the U.S. Army held a three-day conference in Portsmouth, Va., to look at new developments in military science and hardware. The confab was called the “2008 Mad Scientist Future Technology Seminar.” Really. It was.

“The objective of the seminar was to investigate proliferating technologies with the potential to empower individuals and groups in the next 10-25 years,” according to an unclassified summary of the Mad Scientist gathering, obtained by Danger Room.

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The Air Force is fed up with a seemingly endless barrage of attacks on its computer networks from stealthy adversaries whose motives and even locations are unclear. So now the service is looking to restore its advantage on the virtual battlefield by doing nothing less than the rewriting the “laws of cyberspace.” It’s more than a little ironic that the U.S. military, which had so much to do with the creation and early development of Internet, finds itself at its mercy. But as the American armed forces become increasingly reliant on its communications networks, even small, obscure holes in the defense grid are seen as having catastrophic potential.

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Could Twitter become terrorists’ newest killer app? A draft Army intelligence report, making its way through spy circles, thinks the miniature messaging software could be used as an effective tool for coordinating militant attacks.

For years, American analysts have been concerned that militants would take advantage of commercial hardware and software to help plan and carry out their strikes. Everything from online games to remote-controlled toys to social network sites to garage door openers has been fingered as possible tools for mayhem.

This recent presentation–put together on the Army’s 304th Military Intelligence Battalion and found on the Federation of the American Scientists Web site–focuses on some of the newer applications for mobile phones: digital maps, GPS locators, photo swappers, and Twitter mashups of it all.

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The House is set for hearings on one of the hottest–and most contentious–topics in Pentagon research today.

Every arm of the Pentagon’s vast research complex is scrambling to figure out how to turn social and cultural networks into military advantage. Social scientists are being embedded in combat brigades, to explore Iraq and Afghanistan’s “human terrain.” Computer labs back at home are trying to model foreign cultures like the weather and predict the next epicenter of unrest. But all of these projects are loaded with controversy. One of the biggest academic groups in social science has condemned the Human Terrain System program as unethical; prominent researchers and officers think the prediction project is pie-in-the-sky, at best.

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