How Bin Laden Emailed Without Being Detected by US

[gaidensensei]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43011294/ns/world_news-death_of_bin_laden/


How was such an event not forseeable?

 

[Throckmorton]

How was that any more secure than using a proxy?

 

[Attic]

Have to marvel at the lengths this scumbag went in order to continue to have an ability to kill innocent people.

 

[Doppel]

I assume that if he could have done this in other ways to make it easier and probably safer but then he doesn't come across as an IT security expert sitting in his snuggy on the floor.

 

[Jhhnn]

I assume that if he could have done this in other ways to make it easier and probably safer but then he doesn't come across as an IT security expert sitting in his snuggy on the floor.

I'm surprised that his archives weren't encrypted...

 

[irishScott]

How was that any more secure than using a proxy?

No traceable connection of any kind, and if his courier got caught they were undoubtedly brainwashed into claiming credit, ensuring OBL himself remained secure. Also no way to disable communications, given the public venue.

 

[MrEgo]

Even though you can't really conclude much from it, I thought it was funny that he was using a Linksys WRT54G from home. Maybe with a complex 40-bit WEP key.

 

[Doppel]

No traceable connection of any kind, and if his courier got caught they were undoubtedly brainwashed into claiming credit, ensuring OBL himself remained secure. Also no way to disable communications, given the public venue.

But if one was nabbed on the way home with an email he just sent reaching somewhere else things can get bad.

And yes the fact he didn't encrypt this stuff, it just goes to show that you will slip up sometime, somewhere and you'll pay the price for it. Frankly nobody knows if the government actually has all these gigs of captured data or just gigs of DVD screeners that Bin Laden liked to watch but assuming it's the former he really missed the mark by leaving it unencrypted.

 

[Lemon law]

Regardless if OBL used inscription or not, he was a serial Email junkie. And if OBL evaded,all surveillance detection for years, what hope does the el jerko folks have of finding OBL when my email to aunt Betty just happens to be easier to intercept. But when Aunt Betty sez she is holding a bake sale for charity, it could be plain language code for someone to blow up some telephone booth.

Of course if the Federal government wants to know what I think of their unconstitutional
behavior, why intercept my emails, when I will be happy to tell them to their face, to kindly jump into the nearest lake. Its called free speech, and I am using that right it in this very post.

 

[a777pilot]

Why would any sane person reveal this information? There is no need to know.

 

[xj0hnx]

Why would any sane person reveal this information? There is no need to know.

Probably because there is nothing special about it. It's just not amazing that he had someone else send his emails, it's more of a "duh", than an "oh wow".

 

[DrPizza]

What I want to know is how incompetent our government is for releasing all this information. Else, is it just being made up by someone? It's amazing that we can't try suspected terrorists held at Guantanamo because it would result in releasing information about how we tracked them, etc. But, we're divulging all our cards about Osama??!

edit: unless there really is a current plot, and they don't want the terrorists to know that we're on to them. Ahh haaaa! That's gotta be it.

 

[FuzzyDunlop]

Have to marvel at the lengths this scumbag went in order to continue to have an ability to kill innocent people.

but they arent innocent. They are infidels. In his eyes anyways.

Honestly, how can this really be a big suprise? And why in the friggen hell would he have more than 100 flash drives?? does he not know that they are rewritable? idiot.

 

[lord_emperor]

Wouldn't seeing e-mails from a bunch of different internet cafes in Pakistan kind of point out where he was anyway? This is about the worst way to go about it if anything.

 

[xj0hnx]

Wouldn't seeing e-mails from a bunch of different internet cafes in Pakistan kind of point out where he was anyway? This is about the worst way to go about it if anything.

How would a bunch of emails from a public internet cafe indicate anything?

 

[irishScott]

What I want to know is how incompetent our government is for releasing all this information. Else, is it just being made up by someone? It's amazing that we can't try suspected terrorists held at Guantanamo because it would result in releasing information about how we tracked them, etc. But, we're divulging all our cards about Osama??!

edit: unless there really is a current plot, and they don't want the terrorists to know that we're on to them. Ahh haaaa! That's gotta be it.

Osama killed = big political points. That's worth talking about and keeping in the public conscious. Guantanamo is mostly the opposite depending on who you ask.

Also I have a feeling that the reason we don't release information about tracking gitmo prisoners is that at least a few of them probably didn't do much to deserve being there in the first place, which goes back to political egg-on-face. We also might have some extreme rendition cases of gitmo prisoners from allied nations or something that we'd obviously want to keep secret.

 

[Double Trouble]

Probably because there is nothing special about it. It's just not amazing that he had someone else send his emails, it's more of a "duh", than an "oh wow".

That's my first thought as well. This is not at all some "sophisticated" way to evade surveillance, it's pretty much the same thing that's been done for a thousand years in one form or another (sending couriers with messages back and forth etc).

The lack of encryption - if that is indeed the case - is more surprising to me. I'd think they would want everything encrypted. Specifically, I would have expected some form of "hidden in plain sight" stenography or something like that. That way, if a courier got nabbed for something, the local police would not have a clue that the pictures on Abdul's flash drive are more than just pictures of his favorite goat.

 

[Double Trouble]

What I want to know is how incompetent our government is for releasing all this information. Else, is it just being made up by someone? It's amazing that we can't try suspected terrorists held at Guantanamo because it would result in releasing information about how we tracked them, etc. But, we're divulging all our cards about Osama??!

edit: unless there really is a current plot, and they don't want the terrorists to know that we're on to them. Ahh haaaa! That's gotta be it.

I don't see anything particularly special about this information, it's pretty much standard run of the mill stuff, tracking couriers. No info here that the government doesn't want the bad guys to know about. If they nabbed him using some secret surveillance program or some smart intelligence system connecting the dots using seemingly unrelated emails from different sources, now that would be interesting info and it would not be released.

 

[airdata]

I heard them saying on the news that he had a fiber optic connection... was that incorrect?

 

[Pens1566]

I didn't see anything in the article indicating whether the info was encrypted or not. Really doesn't matter one way or another.

 

[PokerGuy]

I didn't see anything in the article indicating whether the info was encrypted or not. Really doesn't matter one way or another.

True, there's probably no encryption available on the general market that can't be broken by the powers that be.

 

[yllus]

I heard them saying on the news that he had a fiber optic connection... was that incorrect?

Fiber to a residence in that part of the world... it's a little unlikely.

True, there's probably no encryption available on the general market that can't be broken by the powers that be.

Even the NSA can't crack a properly passworded AES encrypted file.

 

[PokerGuy]

Even the NSA can't crack a properly passworded AES encrypted file.

I'm not a crypto-expert by any means, but I'm highly skeptical of that assertion. How do we know they don't have some quantum computing based stuff that can crack AES? Again, the disclaimer is that I don't have any knowledge of the technology etc, I just find it hard to believe that generally available encryption is truly not breakable.

 

[rudder]

What I want to know is how incompetent our government is for releasing all this information. Else, is it just being made up by someone? It's amazing that we can't try suspected terrorists held at Guantanamo because it would result in releasing information about how we tracked them, etc. But, we're divulging all our cards about Osama??!

edit: unless there really is a current plot, and they don't want the terrorists to know that we're on to them. Ahh haaaa! That's gotta be it.

Kind of like obama just had to announce bin laden's death at the quickest possible moment... imagine if the CIA has access to those compound documents and was able to nab a few more higher ups before the news got out and they scattered.

 

[Apple Of Sodom]

Specifically, I would have expected some form of "hidden in plain sight" stenography or something like that.

Steganography.