It should also be noted that Jared Cohen has a friendly and personal relation with the boss of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, a connection Cohen used for his operations against the government of Iran. The article "Google to open 'Google Ideas' global technology think tank" in Fortune (August 15, 2010) tells the story (underlines below added by Radio Islam):
Cohen who has traveled widely in the Middle East, was tracking developments on the ground by following the English and translated Farsi postings of Iranian dissidents and opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi on Twitter. Their protests about fraud in President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election, and the violent government crackdown that followed it, were flying to the outside world in 140-character-or-less bursts of comment.
Cohen read that the microblogging service was about to shut down its operations for maintenance. Although the shutdown would be routine and brief (and in the middle of the night in U.S. time zones), the prospect chilled the dissidents’ leaders. Because the government was blocking cell phone texting, Twitter had become a lifeline. The protests were reaching a crescendo: What might happen if Twitter went silent in the middle of a turbulent day?
So Cohen emailed his friend Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder and chairman. Dorsey had been part of a Silicon Valley delegation that Cohen had led to the Middle East earlier that spring to explore prospects for rebuilding Iraq. In a series of emails, Cohen asked Dorsey if the company was aware of the suddenly prominent role that it was playing on the international stage.
