AL Arabiya : Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden had developed sophisticated tactics to communicate with his followers worldwide via the Internet without leaving digital traces for the US government, American intelligence officials have said.
Bin Laden would type a message on his computer without an Internet connection, then save it in flash memory. Then a trusted courier would take the flash drive to a distant Internet café, plug it into a computer, copy Bin Laden’s message into an email and send it, an intelligence official told the Associated Press.
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.
Bin Laden’s traditional system of secrecy was built on trust, which made it difficult to trace using modern-day digital means. The system was so slow and tedious that veteran intelligence officials have marveled at Bin Laden’s ability to maintain it for so long.
The US 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, according to the Associated Press.
Al Qaeda operatives are known to change email addresses, so it’s unclear how many are still active since Bin Laden’s death on May 1. 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 US 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 US, but terrorists have historically used US-based Internet providers or free Internet-based email services.
The cache of electronic documents is so enormous that the US government has enlisted Arabic speakers from around the intelligence community to pore over it.
Officials have said the records revealed no new terror plots but showed Bin Laden remained involved in Al Qaeda’s operations long after the US had assumed he had passed control to his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
The files seized from Bin Laden’s compound not only have the potential to help the US find other Al Qaeda figures, they may also force terrorists to change their routines. That could make them more vulnerable to making mistakes and being discovered.
