How bin Laden emailed without being detected by US

[Eugen Leitl]

(take with a giant grain of salt)

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_bin_laden

How bin Laden emailed without being detected by US

By MATT APUZZO and ADAM GOLDMAN, Associated Press 11 mins ago

WASHINGTON b Using intermediaries and inexpensive computer disks, Osama bin
Laden managed to send emails while in hiding, without leaving a digital
fingerprint for U.S. eavesdroppers to find.

His system was painstaking and slow, but it worked, and it allowed him to
become a prolific email writer despite not having Internet or phone lines
running to his compound.

His methods, described in new detail to The Associated Press by a
counterterrorism official and a second person briefed on the U.S.
investigation, frustrated Western efforts to trace him through cyberspace.
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.

Holed up in his walled compound in northeast Pakistan with no phone or
Internet capabilities, bin Laden would type a message on his computer without
an Internet connection, then save it using a thumb-sized flash drive. He then
passed the flash drive to a trusted courier, who would head for a distant
Internet cafe.

At that location, the courier would plug the memory drive into a computer,
copy bin Laden's message into an email and send it. Reversing the process,
the courier would copy any incoming email to the flash drive and return to
the compound, where bin Laden would read his messages offline.

It was a slow, toilsome process. And it was so meticulous that even veteran
intelligence officials have marveled at bin Laden's ability to maintain it
for so long. The U.S. always suspected bin Laden was communicating through
couriers but did not anticipate the breadth of his communications as revealed
by the materials he left behind.

Navy SEALs hauled away roughly 100 flash memory drives after they killed bin
Laden, and officials said they appear to archive the back-and-forth
communication between bin Laden and his associates around the world.

Al-Qaida operatives are known to change email addresses, so it's unclear how
many are still active since bin Laden's death. But the long list of
electronic addresses and phone numbers in the emails is expected to touch off
a flurry of national security letters and subpoenas to Internet service
providers. The Justice Department is already coming off a year in which it
significantly increased the number of national security letters, which allow
the FBI to quickly demand information from companies and others without
asking a judge to formally issue a subpoena.

Officials gave no indication that bin Laden was communicating with anyone
inside the U.S., but terrorists have historically used U.S.-based Internet
providers or free Internet-based email services.

The cache of electronic documents is so enormous that the government has
enlisted Arabic speakers from around the intelligence community to pore over
it. Officials have said the records revealed no new terror plot but showed
bin Laden remained involved in al-Qaida's operations long after the U.S. had
assumed he had passed control to his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri.

The files seized from bin Laden's compound not only have the potential to
help the U.S. find other al-Qaida figures, they may also force terrorists to
change their routines. That could make them more vulnerable to making
mistakes and being discovered.