I keep thinking someone read this on Cypherpunks where it was meant to be a gag, but took it seriously. On the other hand, there might be one piece of logic here: If the jihadis are willing to die, then hiding their ops messages inside kiddie porn might cause local law enforcement to get all hot and bothered about busting a kiddie porn ring, and not bother calling in other authorities (on time!) for terrorism ties. On the other hand, the jihadis are after all religious, some its conceivable they would not avail themselves of this particularly methodology. (For instance, why don't terrorists ever max out their credit cards?) -TD
Date: Tue, 21 Oct 2008 19:25:32 +1100 From: michaelslists@gmail.com To: pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz Subject: Re: hard to top this bullshit CC: cypherpunks@al-qaeda.net; eugen@leitl.org
On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 6:16 PM, Peter Gutmann <pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz> wrote:
Terrorists 'use child porn' to exchange information
Wow, this really is the myth that never dies, only the names of the participants change. This first cropped up in the mid-90s when it was being used by unknown foreign agents (today these would automatically be "the Chinese") to smuggle secrets out of US national labs, and every few years it crops up again with a few names changed to keep it topical. I'm surprised it took this long for it to be Al Qaeda's turn.
Prediction for the future: At some point it'll be the turn of copyright infringers/file sharers to be the subjects of this myth (if they haven't already, and I missed it).
I guess this is the obvious question/comment but I'll make it anyway:
Why would they do this? It makes not much sense, hiding illegal things in equally illegal things.
It's like hiding marijuana inside cocaine ...
I mean I could see the point if one medium was slightly less legal (like, say, pirated mp3's) but KP has got to be on par with terrorism ...
Peter.
-- noon silky http://skillsforvilla.tumblr.com/ http://www.themonkeynet.com/armada/
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