During last week’s horrific events in Mumbai, the Indian government issued pleas for people witnessing events to stop using Twitter to provide instant news updates. Reports even suggested that the government had reached out to Twitter to block any updates that might provide the terrorists with information about the movements of counter-terrorist forces.

While scores of blogs have remarked on Twitter’s real-time role in the Indian crisis, few have examined the problems users of the service caused security forces attempting to end the siege.

Over the past couple years, the downside of “real time” has been displayed over and over again. When a problem with a JetBlue landing gear forced an emergency landing after several hours circling Los Angeles International Airport, passengers on the plane watched news coverage of their predicament on the televisions mounted on the back of each headrest. By providing real-time TV, the airline lost the ability to manage the message the flight crew might have preferred to deliver to passengers.

But the Indian government’s appeal to curtail Twittering—along with the later revelation that the terrorists carried Blackberries to monitor world reaction—highlights the fact that evil people will find uses for good tools. Twitter and its peers will have to grapple with questions about whether to comply with such requests in the future.

Perhaps the world has grown so accustomed to envisioning terrorists living in Pakistani caves that it’s hard to imagine they might be sophisticated in their use of technology. After the events in Mumbai, though, any police or military strategy for responding to a terrorist act must now factor into their planning the assumption that the bad guys are watching their every move.

The tweets of the person on the street, behind the barricades, probably would provide more than enough intelligence to inform the terrorists’ next moves. But it’s just as likely that a conspirator is mingling with the crowd, tweeting under an account the terrorists are following on their mobile phones. And Twitter isn’t the only tool available. Qik, for example, would allow those holding hostages to watch real-time videos of police activity.

These thoughts occurred to me only over the last several days of following news reports on the situation in India. Terror organizations that distribute Blackberries to their operatives have clearly been thinking about it for some time.

I haven’t heard a proposal for how to deal with this potentially fatal disclosure of information. It’s a case of technology advancing faster than society’s ability to assimilate it into planning for all potential situations. It’s the dark side of the transparency technology has imposed on everybody.

Some may react like the movie industry has to BitTorrent: As long as some people are using it to commit the crime of copyright violation, the MPAA has reasoned in legal proceedings, the entire system should be shut down. Shutting down microsharing sites like Twitter and Qik, though, is not just impractical, it would be futile, since countless such services could replace them (like Jaiku and Plurk for texting, and Livecastfor videocasting), and new ones could be set up in hours. Terrorists could even build a secure Twitter-like environment using Laconica—and may already have.

Fortunately, I haven’t seen any calls to terminate Twitter or other microsharing services.

While security agencies rethink their strategies in a world where their enemies have instant access to information about their movements, the far less dire consequences of of real-time communication should be on the minds of business leaders. If terrorists can use Twitter, so can your company’s critics and adversaries.

The tweeting of breaking news, from tsunamis to terrorist attacks, has become common, but the recent flare-up over a Motrin video to which hundreds of mommy bloggers took offense is the first significant Twitter surge focused on business of which I’m aware—and that was kicked off by a single individual’s tweet weeks after the video first appeared. Before this, Twitter had been used to shine an unwanted light on business, like the time former Yahoo employee Ryan Kuder used Twitter to chronicle his last day on the job after being laid off. We can expect more Twitter surges focused on company behavior.

And it will get worse. Labor union campaigns using Twitter are inevitable. The United Food and Commercial Workers Union wasted no time capitalizing on tragedy by using traditional media channels to condemn Wal-Mart for inadequate preparations for the 5 a.m. Black Friday opening its suburban New York store, resulting in the trampling death of an employee. Wal-Mart had already issued a statement listing the precautions it had taken, but those facts would have been obscured had the union launched its campaign on Twitter, mobilizing its members to flood the service with a hashtag like #walmartdeath.

Like so many others, I love Twitter and other microsharing services like Qik and Utterli. But it would be just plain foolhardy of organizations—from anti-terror security agencies to corporations to nonprofits—to fail to incorporate into their communication strategies the likelihood of a critical Twitter surge targeting their activities.