How bin Laden emailed without being detected by US

Source: AP

By MATT APUZZO and ADAM GOLDMAN

WASHINGTON (AP) - Despite having no Internet access in his hideout, Osama bin Laden was a prolific email writer who built a painstaking system that kept him one step ahead of the U.S. government's best eavesdroppers.

His methods, described in new detail to The Associated Press by a counterterrorism official and a second person briefed on the U.S. investigation, served him well for years and frustrated Western efforts to trace him through cyberspace. The arrangement allowed bin Laden to stay in touch worldwide without leaving any digital fingerprints behind.

The people spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive intelligence analysis.

Bin Laden's system was built on discipline and trust. But it also left behind an extensive archive of email exchanges for the U.S. to scour. The trove of electronic records pulled out of his compound after he was killed last week is revealing thousands of messages and potentially hundreds of email addresses, the AP has learned.


Read more: http://apnews.excite.com/article/20110513/D9N68HP00.html

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In this Dec. 24, 1998 file photo, al-Qaida leader Osama Bin Laden speaks to a selected group of reporters in the mountains of Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan. Foreign and Pakistani analysts, former operatives of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency and military men interviewed by The Associated Press say that some ISI agents, local police and local officials most likely did know about bin Laden's hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The question is, at what level, and how close to the top? (AP Photo/Rahimullah Yousafzai, File)

k&r

would locate the area he was in.

Providing they were looking for him:shrug:

If they didn't know he was sending email, or were not able to tap into the emails he had sent, then he could have been doing it from his house, and it still would have been just as "secure"

And if they were tapped in and following it, if he was sending the massive volume of email noted, surely they had to repeatedly use some internet cafe's. And therefore could be tracked there or recorded by someone with the means of say, the CIA. And then how hard is it to follow a guy a few blocks. And then a few weeks later, a few more. Repeat until you have a hideout.

Hell, they did say it was the courier that led us to him. Maybe the latter is exactly what they did. I guess his system wasn't all that secure, once a president actually prioritized catching him.

once a president actually prioritized catching him.

Interesting story; glad you posted it OmahaSteve.

I will be in your fair city Monday night.



Cher

WTF? The absolutely ridiculousness of this is unbelievable. Other then spying on Americans what the fuck are they good for.

I wonder how high DU is on their priority list.

I doubt it's even on the list.

For all we know, that may be the only real reason for their existence.

So the dude was essentially writing snail mail and his couriers were then delivering it to the modern post office equivalent of their choice? That's some devious terrorist shit right there.

Interestingly, but entirely predictably, there's no mention of encryption. Probably cracked or had access to whatever the jihadis were using.

That's some old-school encryption.... and doesn't flag a message a message for being unusual like, oh, PGP would.

Examples:
Cake and two sticks = 9/11
Godzilla movie = Brooklyn Bridge

No decryption engine known to man can currently match the code the human brain can handle.

If they have info from them this quickly; it suggests he had no or piss poor encryption. Did not one person in his entire organization think to have a method to instantly destroy the hard drives in the computers?

Good to know that Al Qaeda is actually rather stupid.

that Bin Laden didn't want his organization to outlive him. He specifically stated that he didn't want his children to join up in the fight. Maybe he just wanted it all to end if he was gone, because somewhere inside himself he felt it was headed out of control and could go on forever if it wasn't destroyed. Maybe he believed that if he was caught it would only be because god had abandoned him, in which case he would abandon the fight, because a god that would let him be caught must not believe in his cause.

Or maybe he believed that the US was complicit and would never want to find him anyway, because the powers that be needed him to keep driving the military industrial complex. Maybe Obama decided the only way to beat the rethugs and fix the economy was to end the game and shrink the budget by obviating the need for such a huge military.

Who knows, really.

we're calling him stupid?

We've even known for years that he was using couriers and we still were outsmarted.

Maybe Al Q'aeeda is stupid, but what does that say about the rest of the world, including us?

Some MacGyvered-up device to burn or demagnetize all the drives. Ctrl+Alt+Insert activates the Mission: Impossible self destruct, thank you, Mr. Phelps. (Damn, I watch too much TV.)

They're sifting through 24/7.

Doesn't surprise me at all. People were tiring of the old boogeyman, so we had to get a new one and Moammar was just right, especially after his dramatic washed in the blood turnaround to good old USA BFF. Great drama to reverse it and go after him! That's the real reason the soap operas have all been cancelled - we needed experienced plot twisters so that the "defense" establishment can keep those $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ coming in.