Documented criminal/terrorist uses of cryptography?

[Steve Furlong]

dmolnar wrote:

> Does anyone have pointers to documented instances of terrorists or
> criminals using stego or crypto? As opposed to the speculation recently
> seen regarding Osama bin Laden.

I very strongly suspect there's been no documented criminal use of stego
in the computer age; we'd have heard it trumpeted in the past few weeks.

Criminal use seems to be pretty rare but not unheard of. The FBI put a
keyboard bug in Scarfo's computer because he was using PGP and they
couldn't read his mail or files. I vaguely recall complaints that
Echelon couldn't evesdrop on some European companies suspected of some
form of nefarious dealings because they used encryption. Take that with
a grain of salt, because I can't remember details, can't find a link,
and may be remembering a hypothetical rather than an actual event. I've
heard of a few cases where someone was attempting to use crypto
(PGPDisk, probably) to encrypt the files on his computer, but did it
wrong and the cops were able to read them. No details here, either;
sorry. You can also find more criminal use of crypto when you consider
that mere use of crypto has been criminalized in some places; I assume
that's not what you were looking for.

Terrorist use of crypto seems to be purely hypothetical at this point.
It's probably being used, but no one's documented it that I've come
across. Same caveat as above; if you expand the definition of terrorist
to include Jim Bell, then there is certainly terrorist use of
encryption.


SRF

-- 
Steve Furlong    Computer Condottiere   Have GNU, Will Travel
  617-670-3793

"Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly
while bad people will find a way around the laws." -- Plato