WASHINGTON, 11 October — President Bush and his senior advisers are convinced that terrorist Osama Bin Laden is communicating with his agents via the Internet, government sources recently told Matt Drudge’s "Drudge Report."
"(The Internet) appears to be a major mode of communication between Bin Laden and his network," said the White House insider who demanded anonymity.
"The Internet has proven to be a good place to hide and to communicate in real-time," said the source.
"We know there’s been an exchange of e-mail between Bin Laden’s top agents, but there also may be ongoing chats, like instant messages."
Following the Sept. 11 attacks, librarians recalled seeing "Arab looking" patrons spending hours at publicly available Internet terminals. The librarians reported that these men would act nervous when they would approach them at the computer stations. The libraries are located in some of the states that are the focus of the official investigation of the attacks.
It is well-known that technology can be used to mask communications, and computers to provide new and complicated ways to hide information, and that terrorists have apparently succeeded in using a combination of very low-tech and very high-tech strategies to communicate — yet evade detection.
"A different game is being played," said computer security expert Janah Moreh of Sigaba, a San Mateo, California, company that provides e-mail security products. "The players are able to take advantage of these new mediums."
Other Al-Qaeda operations seemed to have used 21st century technologies, taking advantage of discoveries in information hiding.
In some instances, terrorists are thought to have hidden in plain sight — using unsecured e-mail from anonymous accounts on Yahoo and Hotmail, amid the enormous volume of e-mail traffic. In other instances, using encryption and steganography, they are thought to have altered or camouflaged their messages so well that surveillance failed to recognize them.
"Conventional surveillance makes the assumption that the people you’re looking for aren’t anonymous," Moreh said. "On the Internet, you can communicate without a trace of who you are."
Total secrecy in this increasingly transparent world is rarely possible — even for a network as elusive as Al-Qaeda.
That’s because the US government and its allies use a wide range of eavesdropping tools, ranging from electronic wiretaps on phones and computers to satellite surveillance.
Scouring electronic files on Internet servers, federal authorities are said to have located copies of hundreds of e-mail messages in Arabic and English — sent 30 to 45 days before the attack, using personal and public library computers and a variety of Internet service providers — that suggest a plan behind the Sept. 11 tragedy.
Until relatively recently, US intelligence had successfully eavesdropped on Al-Qaeda phone conversations; while digital phones offer more privacy than analog phones, both can be overheard with the right equipment. Until a year ago, intelligence officials reportedly had tapped a conversation of Bin Laden’s with his mother, as well as others.
Then he is thought to have discovered he was being heard, because he seems to have dropped most electronic communications.
This year’s trial of the embassy bombing plotters revealed that Bin Laden associates began to use encryption before 1998. Wadih El-Hage, one of the four convicted, sent encrypted e-mails under names like "Norman" to associates.
Ramzi Yousef, the convicted mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, is reported to have used encryption to conceal details of a plan to crash 11 US airliners. NSA experts broke the encryption and foiled the plot — saving many lives.
Sometimes members of the Al-Qaeda confederation have not used sophisticated Internet encryption tools, but simple code words, according to London’s Sunday Times. For instance, "working" is said to mean jihad, "tools" meant weapons, "potatoes" mean grenades and "the director" was an alias for Bin Laden, according to the Times.
The conclusion thus far: The vast and scattered Al-Qaeda confederation of terrorists has used a combination of very low-tech and very high-tech strategies to communicate — yet evade detection.
US disinformation campaign?
Some experts, however, have strong suspicions about Bin Laden’s Internet tools: "I thinks it’s a disinformation campaign being waged by people in the Administration who would like to get control of the Internet," said Wayne Madsen, an intelligence specialist who formerly worked with NSA.
"Bin Laden was well aware of the fact that intelligence agencies were picking up on his satellite phone calls so he decided to forego the use of phones, or anything that would suggest that he and his top lieutenants were communicating by the Internet."
Madsen said the creation of the Office of Homeland Security, headed by former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, has named Richard Clark as their "cyber security czar," who Madsen calls a modern version of "Dr. Strangelove."
"I don’t think the White House fully understands the machinations of some of the people they have appointed to the new Office of Homeland Security, like Clark and other people in the Pentagon, who want to gain control over the Internet," said Madsen.
"They’ve been waiting for an incident like this for many years to bring the Internet system into their control, and now they have it."
Arab News was unable to find anyone willing to comment on these Internet findings at the White House, National Security Council or the FBI.
"Unfortunately, we cannot give out any specifics of the investigation — whether they are true, or not, we simply cannot corroborate anything at this point," a spokeswoman at the FBI said.
