FC: WorldNetDaily reports WTC-Pentagon terrorists used encryption
Declan McCullagh
declan at well.com
Fri Sep 21 15:15:46 PDT 2001
http://www.wartimeliberty.com/article.pl?sid=01/09/21/2220202
WorldNetDaily Reports WTC Terrorists Used Encryption
posted by admin on Friday September 21, @05:17PM
There must be something about encryption and terrorists in
the same graf that makes levelheaded journalists go nutty. Just take a
compelling -- if only because it's so strange -- article posted
Thursday on the conservative WorldNetDaily news site. It claims,
implausibly, that Osama bin Laden "has the NSA beat on the employment
front, hiring the best computer experts on the market." One allegedly
is Nabil Khan Kani, a Syrian living in Barcelona. Kani's supposedly
the author of some data-hiding steganography products that have been
giving U.S. spies fits. An excerpt: "Computer and terrorism experts
suggest that the missing Syrian computer whiz was the author of the
technology known as steganography... This technology enables users to
bypass electronic monitoring by hiding messages randomly in seemingly
innocent digital files, such as music files, those of the popular
online marketplace eBay, pornographic files or even e-mail headers...
U.S. intelligence has been unable to trace their authors and
recipients in the three years since first detecting evidence of their
existence in the files of the bin Laden organization. U.S. agencies
now believe that the attacks in New York and Washington were
coordinated through those encrypted electronic messages, which were
opened by 'key' holders. They also believe that terrorists are in
possession of all or part of the codes used by the Drug Enforcement
Administration, the National Reconnaissance Office, Air Force
Intelligence, Army Intelligence, Naval Intelligence, Marine Corps
Intelligence and the intelligence offices of the State Department and
Department of Energy." Watch for Sen. Judd "Anti-Crypto" Gregg to
cite this report in a floor speech.
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