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BBC: AOL, Earthlink Are 'Cooperating' With FBI

Posted by timothy on from the trading-in-a-pinch-of-liberty dept.

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?

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  1. Bin Laden's people "using cybercafes in Pakistan" by JPMH · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.