Did the US defeat wiretapping success? (fwd)

Jim Choate ravage at ssz.com
Sun Sep 16 10:04:03 PDT 2001



---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 16 Sep 2001 14:13:23 +0200
From: Hadmut Danisch <hadmut at danisch.de>
To: cryptography at wasabisystems.com
Subject: Did the US defeat wiretapping success?

As far as I heard from the news (who knows how
much news meet reality...) the CIA and NSA could
not find a real correlation between the terrorists
and Bin Laden (or at least they couldn't within the
first days after).

German news magazine DER SPIEGEL (current issue, p. 27)
reports, that the german intelligence service BND
(Bundesnachrichtendienst) did find that link.

Usually wiretapping people of Bin Laden's organization is
found as good as useless, because these people keep
strict discipline when using phones. In contrast to that,
some of them dropped discipline after the attacks.
They did jubilate and strut with their attacks. This
was wiretapped by BND and forwarded to the US. The 
BND asked the US to keep this absolutely secret, because
the BND hoped to catch more of these phone calls and
thus more information, what obviously
wouldn't work if it got publicly known.

US senator Orrin Hatch is said to have publicly revealed
this wiretapping success, thus sealing this source of
information.

Can anyone confirm this story?

What's the use of a crypto-ban and wiretapping, or
an intelligence service in general, if
american authorities behave like this?

Hadmut




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