BBC: AOL, Earthlink Are 'Cooperating' With FBI

braddock writes: "The BBC is now reporting that 'The FBI is scouring e-mail accounts for clues as to who might have been behind the terror attacks' and that AOL and Earthlink have confirmed that they are cooperating with investigators. Earthlink maintains 'We're co-operating, but we're not installing any surveillance equipment on our networks.' AOL and Earthlink together have approximatey 36 million accounts. Scary how fast privacy can be compromised when the bulk of a country's e-mail services are centralized." I wonder which ISPs really are installing Carnivore, if not the two largest in the country. Maybe this means it's already in place?

Comments

Bin Laden's people "using cybercafes in Pakistan"

[JPMH]

Interesting piece in today's Sunday Telegraph on how Bin Laden is set up in Afghanistan, written by one of the BBC's most senior reporters, John Simpson, from the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The full article is at
http://portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml= /news/2001/09/16/wbin116.xml

Extract:

Forget those earnest statements from Taliban spokesmen that bin Laden is under house arrest in Kandahar or that his communications equipment has been confiscated. These things are said to deceive the simple-minded, and to distance the Taliban from his activities.
...

Bin Laden has one of the most sophisticated communications systems in the region. A communications vehicle is stationed at a distance from him, and his calls are routed through it. That way, if they are intercepted, he won't be hit by some smart weapon fired from a distance.

But he makes few calls anyway; instead, when he wants to speak to people in Pakistan, he sends his Afghan spokesman quietly across the border. No amount of international eavesdropping can detect that.

Other bin Laden agents make for the internet cafes that have sprung up in the Pakistani border town of Peshawar. They use the most common service providers, all of them American, and refer to each other and to bin Laden himself by their first names. In the welter of e-mail traffic their messages go unnoticed. If approval for the World Trade Centre operation came from bin Laden, then this is how it would have been done.

Real issue: national database and dossiers

[joneshenry]

In my opinion, "victory" for the United States can be defined to be a narrow achievable objective: Victory is the prevention of another massive terrorist attack on United States soil led by foreign nationals from Middle Eastern countries. It remains to be seen whether the people of the US are prepared to pay the price.

The willingness of the terrorists to die in the commission of their attacks isn't a strength, it's a weakness. The willingness to die restricts potential recruits to a relatively small segment of the population. As far as detection goes, the situation is far better than in the 70s when people who looked like Japanese tourists could suddenly pull automatic weapons out of their bags as happened at Tel Aviv's Lod Airport in May 1972 at the cost of 24 lives. Radical Marxism backed by covert support from Easter bloc intelligence agencies is no longer turning out as many terrorists with different nationalities as Germany did with Baader-Meinhof or Venezuela did with Carlos the Jackal. Furthermore in the 1970s members of attacking terrorist teams often were female such as Leila Khaled.

Trying to track the terrorists back to their native lands is the United States weakness and their strength. On the other hand, their operating on United States soil should be their weakness and our strength. The suspicious eyes and mouths willing to inform the authorities of any suspicious activity should accompany them wherever they go.

Suicide attackers have to be kept in a constant state of psychological preparedness. They have to travel together in at least pairs because they have to have reinforcement of the need for them to die. Often their support comes from the only people they can trust, relatives.

In short, suicide attackers who are foreign nationals from a distinct ethnic group are the perfect targets for proactive profiling. The question is whether the people, the intelligence agencies, the leadership, and the judicial system of the United States are going to be willing to make the necessary painful decisions. To easily separate suspects from nonsuspects, reducing the amount of work by two orders of magnitude, the people will have to accept a comprehensive national database with easy means of checking attributes such as fingerprints, voice, DNA, photographs. The United States does have a population of millions of loyal citizens of Middle Eastern descent. (No suspected hijackers or accomplices born in the United States have been identified so far.) Some means must be found to quickly distinguish them from foreign nationals so that they can efficiently exercise their rights as citizens.

Intelligence agencies must find the means to share information and break the bonds of bureaucratic inertia. Analyses such as Alexander B. Calahan's apply far beyond how to organize assassination teams, they apply equally to how to organize terrorism prevention teams. It is becoming clear that United States intelligence agencies had all the clues needed to prevent the attack. The WTC had been a previous target by the same groups, there had been an earlier plot to hijack a large number of airplanes, two hijackers were under watch by the FBI. What are needed are anti-terrorism units organized like special forces units who are allowed the initiative and the time to follow-up leads and build complete dossiers on suspects and the people they interact with.

Of course for this to happen the leadership and especially the courts have to get out of the way. The courts have to recognize that there has to be a distinction between the rights of citizens and the rights of foreign nationals, especially when there is a clearly demonstrated danger that a segment of foreign nationals is plotting to inflict massive terrorist attacks on the nation.

Carnivore, Echelon are simply manifestations of the truth that supply will increase to meet demand. We are no longer talking about hypotheticals. Foreign nationals are now plotting acts of mass terrorism on United States soil that have the potential to claim 50,000+ lives a strike. Something has to be done and something will be done.