Airlines know the communications preferences of terrorists?

Gawker is musing that terrorists prefer video chat to email or Twitter when it comes to communicating with their operatives. Evidence? Exhibit number 1 is the experience of writer John Battelle, who was told to stop using in-flight Wi-Fi to video chat with his wife and kids while flying on United Airlines yesterday.

When he pressed the flight attendant on why he couldn’t use iChat to talk to his family, the attendant suggested that he could “communicate with a terrorist on the ground.” I suppose that’s true, but couldn’t he use IM, email, Twitter, Facebook or any other countless apps to do the same thing?