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Inside Al-Qaeda's Hard Drive
prostoalex writes "Alan Cullison covered the events in Afghanistan for Wall Street Journal in late 2001. On the day that Kabul fell Cullison was offered to buy a bunch of computers from a local al-Qaeda office. For $1100 Cullison purchased an IBM desktop and a Compaq laptop. Before giving the hard drives to CIA agents in Afghanistan, Cullison copied the contents and shares some of the electronic messages in September's Atlantic Monthly. Interesting insight on al-Qaeda's financial operations and their merger with Taliban movement. The letters include e-mail messages from Osama bin Laden himself."
Anything that would have been useful to CIA before wouldn't be know that all this has been made public - any financial information would be useless, since with this online, they would have taken the money out. Intel is really only useful if not everyone knows it.
That's either incredibly crazy, or scary, or both.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
The funny thing is the notes on the computer indicate they never even thought of using chemical weapons because they thought it would be too complicated. It wasn't until the American government began making public statements about how easy it would be for certain rouge nations to make simple but deadly chemical weapons, like mustard gas, they they started working on these projects!
There is always tracking irregularity to ensure that the traces of previous write cycles aren't completely lost. Reading a hard drive while subtracting the top level bit pattern from the signal will allow the previous signal to be retrieved, and this process can go several levels deep. An electron microscope is unnecessary and won't work (you are thinking of the visible bits on CDs, I guess.) This is why, if you really want to erase a hard drive, the best approach is to take the disks out and heat them to destruction or whack them with a mallet. You can overwrite many times with an alternating bit pattern, of course, but physical destruction is the fastest and surest way.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
I would have thought that they, being so organised and all, would have used really strong encryption on their computers. Also, would they not see any conflict of interests in using US company computers and US software?
Some of this gives me the creeps knowing that I was living in Ottawa at the time. This underscores why the US embassy there resembles a fortress. Unfortunately, if they had decided to strike there, it would probably be the only thing left standing in a 2 block radius. Maybe the Israelis would be interesting in moving into the Diefenbunker. (The WW3 nuclear bomb shelter built just out of town by a former PM, since abanoned by the canadian gov't and turned into a museum)
...
- - - - - - -
To: Real name unknown
From: Unknown
Folder: Hamza
Date: August 23, 2001
Special file for our brother Abu Bakr al-Albani ["the Albanian"] on the nature of his mission.
First, the mission: Gather information on:
1. Information on American soldiers who frequent nightclubs in the America-Canada border areas
2. The Israeli embassy, consulate, and cultural center in Canada
3. If it is possible to enter America and gather information on American soldier checkpoints, or on the American army in the border areas inside America
4. Information on the possibility of obtaining explosive devices inside Canada
I have given to our brother $1,500 for travel expenses in Canada and America, and also the cost of the ticket for the trip back to us after four months, God willing.
My rights don't need management.
I think you mean "All your Qaeda are belong to us" because Al Qaeda means "The Base" in their language. Isn't that fucking funny? All your Qaeda. ROFL.
While there may be some truth the the story of how Cullison acquired these computers, I highly doubt the CIA would simply let him publish the information the HDs contained.
They have special rooms in Cuba for people who disseminate this kind of material.
Which means that the stuff published was vetted (and probably carefully rewritten) by the CIA. To what end, I don't know. But rest assured, there is nothing in the article that you (or the bad guys) are not meant to see.
Bin Ladin is succeeding in his propaganda war, in large part due to the actions of Bush. Their main aim is to draw the Islamic world and the West into a clash of civilisations. Invading Afghanistan was seen as reasonable by most of the Islamic world - thousands of innocent Americans had just died, there was enormous sympathy and the direct perpetrators were in Afghanistan - that and Afghanistan has no real special religious significance for Muslims, unlike Saudi Arabia or Iraq (The Shrine of Iman Ali, Najaf in general, Baghdad, former capital of the Islamic Caliphate).
By invading Iraq, Bush has done more to forward Osama bin Ladin's propaganda than any other action he could have taken. Osama bin Ladin said, that the US will invade your country, the US will take your oil, the US is ruled by Jews and is acting to protect Israel, the US talk about "freedom" but they will crush you under their boots, they will rape your women and torture your men, they will desecrate your holy shrines. So Bush goes and invades one of the most holy Islamic nations which is oil rich, guards the oil ministry while the rest of Baghdad descends into chaos, the neo-cons are well known to be behind the invasion and the original neo-cons were Jews (not the ones now - but they still have very strong ties with Israel's Likud party and Sharon), then there was the torture scandal with reports of rape and torture by American forces, they attack the shrine of Iman Ali and the one of the Sayyids (al Sadr) ie. descendants of The Prophet, which is something only Saddam Hussein and most importantly the caliph Yazid (the worse villain in Shi'ite history) did. Even better, before Iraq only Sunnis formed the Islamic terrorist groups directly attacking the US. Most of the Shi'ite population are as wary of bin Ladin as the US as he considers them heretics. Now by doing a Yazid and attacking the shrine of Iman Ali, all the Shi'ites in the world hate the US as well. For example recently, an elder in one of the Shi'ite strongholds in India warned Americans not to enter the area as he could not guarantee their safety. In Iraq we are seeing Sunni hardliners and Shi'ite hardliners unite for the first time since the war of independence against the British.
Honestly could Bush do anything more to *help* bin Ladin win his propaganda war? Oh, and also because all man-power has been diverted to Iraq, the hunt for bin Ladin has effectively been outsourced to Pakistan (divided loyalties, military dictatorship and all) and the N. Korean threat is being ignored as troops (and White House attention) is rushed from Korea to Iraq.
Personally I think history will see Bush's invasion of Iraq in the same way we currently see the actions taken immediately preceding WWI where a heinous (but not disastrous event like an invasion) led a huge superpower to try to crush a country related to but not directly involved in the event for pre-existing reasons not related to the heinous event in question which led to other countries intervening in a complex system of alliances and ethnic loyalties that cascaded out of control into a war to end all wars. Except this time, a war to end all wars is what bin Ladin actually wants.
Now fast forward to today: many Jews leave peacefully and happily in the United States, far more than live in Israel. So maybe Israel isn't necessary to fulfill it's original "Zionist mission". At least right now. Of course, with all of the nice educated folk here on Slashdot who subtly attack Israel and its right to exist, it's not hard to see why many American Jews might still be paranoid enough to continue supporting Zionist causes - we have learned our lessons from history. In any case, there is a reality on the ground, which is many Jews living in Israel and many Palestinian Arabs living in Gaza and the West Bank. The Israelis have won several wars over the last 50 years with their neighbors (who generally speaking attacked them trying to grab land), partially due to overt American support. Of course, that American support was no different from the American support given to other allied democratic governments during the Cold War. And now today, it's pretty tough to just abandon all those Israelis and let them be slaughtered by their unfriendly neighbors.
In any case, opinions on how to solve the disputes between the Israelis and Palestinians (and both sides certainly have legitimate grievances that need to be resolved), the assertion that if Israel didn't exist, nobody would have been hurt ignores basically all the events of the twentieth century and displays a complete ignorance of historical knowledge.
>Obviously shattering a drive would make it difficult to recover from, they are more than capable of putting it back together or analyzing individual fragments. Very few would want to recover a drive that was shredded, but there are people that have perfected the technique and are able to do it. Finally, some seem to think that you can degauss a hard drive but this is simply not practical. The magnetic fields required to do this would require medical or military grade equipement and a very large amount of power. Information destroyed in this way is also recoverable regardless, simply at an increasing cost for the power of the magnetic field used.
***
Can I recommend holding the little platters to a bench grinder until they are nothing but dust?
Cost: $60
Time: 20 minutes.
As far as recovery, I would imagine that you just record the analog signal from the (so called) digital drive and apply an algorith slightly simular to reading '2in5' or other multiwidth barcode signals. Look for step changes at certain amplitudes during the rise from 0 to 1 and so on. Sounds like a fun project for the do-it-yourselfer.
Another thing. Only two important scenarios should be noted:
1) When the time comes (knock knock, open up its the [FBI!][Al Quada!][policio!]), you do not have time to write random data 20 times. You better have a very well encrpyted partition that does not automount, forget having a swap file/partition, a password for the PC is not enough :).
Alternatly , you could use a USB flash drive and a method to physically destroy the chip in five seconds. The drive should be sitting in an arbor press vertically while your using it
2) If you ever find yourself having the time and need to destroy your data, go with the bench grinder.
I would imagine that the biggest secret is that anytime the police report that they recovered the data from tha laptop, It was because the crook was careless, not because the cops have skills. They never mention breaking AES256 or anything. They just don't bother to tell you that the data was wide open. I think its called a mindfuck in some circles.
Cheers
The government which is strong enough to protect you from everything is strong enough to take everything from you.
If that were true, would they need the incentive of 70 virgins?
That virgins in the afterlife for martyrs thing has been blown way out of proportion by the press (because its weird and weird news sells) and by those who have an interest in downplaying these people's real motivations -- sex-crazed nutjobs don't get any sympathy, but the public will have far more empathy for someone who lost their parents and little sister to a "police action."
If we actually started to gain some insight into what makes these people tick, we might have to address our own short-comings in our handling of the matter and if there is one thing a politician can't do, it is admit that he was wrong.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
From someone that has copied several drives, I how it works. I would like to ask how he managed to recover deleted e-mails if this was a copy of the original computer files? When you copy something, in general only files not marked with the 'deleted' or 'removed' tag are copied (To speed things up). So unless he used some kind of low level copying function and based on his technical know-how, I'm not sure that he did, it seems unlikely this could be done.
"If Western civil society had simply condemned the act, given the Taliban 30 days to deliver the criminals"
... Or by the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, or by the Shia in Iraq, or...
Was a week not long enough? What about the requests for extradition for acts before September 2001, such as the bombing of the African embassies?
"And been very careful to not kill a single innocent civilian, Al Quaeda would have been ostracised by their own support base."
Why? Because we bent over backwards to suit their double standard? It is not enough to try our best to prevent those innocent deaths, even when compared to the al Qaeda tactics that deliberately target civillians? And this is before we get into the nasty details over disagreements over just who was a civillian and who was not (such as "devout worshippers" at a holy cite that were operating a piece of equipment that "just happened" to look and operate like an anti-aircraft battery...)
And what reason is there to believe that, even if we did meet that double standard, al Qaeda would loose support?
"Western civil society has guaranteed Al Quaeda a place in history and guaranteed a generation or two of on-going fighting that will cause the deaths of many, many more people."
And what if Western inaction would have caused the deaths of many more? Which was worse for Afghanistan, outside military intervention in 2001, or a decade under the Taliban? Is it better that those people die by the hands of their countrymen, even if more people die and in far uglier ways?
"I think every country faced with local terrorists has learnt through bitter experience that force does not solve this kind of problem. Dialogue and negotiation are always, finally, the only way to end the cycle of violence."
So, instead of giving Timothy McVeigh a lethal injection we should simply have had a talk with him and then let him go about his business?
"This lesson has been learnt by the British in Northern Ireland, by the Spanish in the Basque Country, by the French in Sardinia, the Sri Lankans"
"Nothing short of genocide - and even that is not certain - will stop more embittered and manipulated youths growing up to fill the gaps left by arrest, detention, assassination."
Even if those doing the manipulations are wrong? Is the majority always right?
Actually, I believe all the evidence suggests that OBL didn't actually think the towers would fall on 9/11. The attack was more symbolic than that, and while he certainly wasn't upset that they fell, the success of the mission exceeded his expectations.
The objective of terrorists is to cause terror, to obtain press, to communicate your views, and to bring about some kind of political change.
OBL screaming on a bullhorn in Afganistan doesn't make much of an impact on the world. OBL recruiting crews who fly planes into buildings does.
It really isn't the numbers that matter, it is the fact that you are on peoples' minds, and that you are causing those people to think about making changes in order to appease you.
Diplomacy, war, and terrorism are basically different ways of accomplishing the same goal - getting somebody else to do something that you want them to do, that they would otherwise rather not do. The first generally doesn't involve killing, the second generally tries to limit killing to military participants and the fewest number of noncombatants necessary to get them to fall into line, and the third generally has no set rules at all.
War will not be stopped by being nice to people. Neither will terrorism. Now, not being nice to people will promote both war and terrorism, but they will always exist as long as people hunger for power.
For some people it isn't enough to have a nice life - they need to be able to control other people to be happy. And so there will always be terrorists...
Is there a reasoned, sensible pro-Palestinian debate anywhere?
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
There are no objective truths.
Insight is only given to the seeker of insight, and you, Sir (or Madam), are a fuckwit.
My truth is that I do not believe in the existence of God (Allah/JHVH/etc), but I can not rule their existence out of the realm of the possible. Why not?
I have no way of proving nor disproving the existence of a being capable of creating a universe, and therefore control the rules governing this universe, and in the end, the means to control the evidence of existence/non-existence.
On the choice of a deity to not show itself:
Why should I care whether or not my code knows that I've created it, as long as it does what I've designed it to?