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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."
Was the large collection of J-Lo pictures. Osama loves da booty.
"All your base are belong to us"
How does he know this wasn't a plant? They've could placed fake plans/email/etc knowing this person would turn it over to authorities and thus throw them off the trail. To make things look even more real, you could lightly erase the data and let the CIA recover it.
LMAO!!!11 I iz da best at t3rr0r !!11
-- Hax0r B1n L4den.
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!
From: Osama Bin Laden
Date: Wednesday, April 21, 2004 12:53 PM
Subject: TRANSFER
Dear Sir/Madam,
I am fine today and how are you? I hope this letter will find you in the best of health. I am Osama Bin Laden, the Chairman of the "Down with the West Committee", of "Al Qaeda (AQ)", a subsidiary of the Saudi Arabian sanctioned Groups (SASG).
Al Qaeda (AQ) was set up by the late Head of State, General Sani Abacha who died on 18th June 1998, to manage the excess revenue accruing from the sales of Opium and its allied products as a domestic increase in the piate products to develop the communities in the Afghani poppy producing areas. The estimated annual revenue for 1999 was $45 Billion US Dollars Ref. FMF A26 Unit 3B Paragraph "D" of the Auditor General of the Muslim Republic of Afghanistan Report of Nov. 1999 on estimated revenue.
I am the Chairman of the Contract Award Committee, and my committee is solely responsible for awaiting and paying of contracts on behalf of the Talibani Government. My Committee Awarded Contracts to foreign contractors for Irrigation and Ecological Matters in the poppy producing areas of Afghanistan. We overshot the contract sum by US$25,000,000.00. We have paid the contractors and withholding the balance of US$25,000, 000.00. But, because of the existence of some of the domestic laws forbidding civil servants in Afghanistan from opening, operating and maintaining foreign accounts, we do not have the expertise to transfer this balance of fund to a foreign account.
However, this balance of US$25,000, 000.00 has been secured in form of Credit/Payment to a foreign contractor, hence we wish to transfer into your bank account as the beneficiary of the fund. We have also arrived at a conclusion that you will be given 20% of the total sum transferred as our foreign partner, while 5% will be reserved for incidental expenses that both parties will incur in the course of actualizing this transaction, and the balance of 75% will be kept for the committee members.
If you know that you will be capable of helping us actualize this transaction, you should send to me immediately the details of your bank particulars or open a new bank account where we can transfer the money US$25,000, 000.00, which you will be holding in trust for us until we come to your country for our share. Your nature of business does not matter in this transaction. The required details includes your company's name, address, your private personal telephone/fax numbers, your full name and address, including your complete bank details where the transferred fund will be routed by the Apex Bank.
Note that this transaction is expected to be actualized within 21 working days from the day the required details are forwarded to the Federal Ministry of Finance who will approve the needed foreign exchange control allocation for the release of this money to your account. Please, treat this as top secret. You should contact me urgently.
Thanks for your cooperation.
Yours faithfully,
Osama Bin Laden.
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
To: The American People
From: Osama bin Laden
Folder: Publications
Date: October 3, 2001
So what exatly is the email address for "The American People?" I mean, if the found email had that as the address book name, what was the address listed?
Seriously, I think this could very well be a well executed plant. Be assured that the Office of Special Plans is still hard at work.
Guru Meditation #6d416769.21610a21
For instance, take this extract from a letter written by Ramzi bin al-Shibh (written after the Afghan invasion, but before the Iraqi invasion):
Because of Saddam and the Baath Party, America punished a whole population. Thus its bombs and its embargo killed millions of Iraqi Muslims. And because of Osama bin Laden, America surrounded Afghans and bombed them, causing the death of tens of thousands of Muslims ... God said to assault whoever assaults you, in a like manner ... In killing Americans who are ordinarily off limits, Muslims should not exceed four million non-combatants, or render more than ten million of them homeless. We should avoid this, to make sure the penalty [that we are inflicting] is no more than reciprocal. God knows what is best.
And then there is this, written by Bin Laden himself:
Our current battle is against the Jews. Our faith tells us we shall defeat them, God willing. However, Muslims find that the Americans stand as a protective shield and strong supporter, both financially and morally. The desert storm that blew over New York and Washington should, in our view, have blown over Tel Aviv. The American position obliged Muslims to force the Americans out of the arena first to enable them to focus on their Jewish enemy. Why are the Americans fighting a battle on behalf of the Jews? Why do they sacrifice their sons and interests for them?
Now, of course there is no denying that the mindset behind all this is evil. But it is rational in its twisted way. There are specific and clear reasons for why these people commit acts of terrorism. By absolutely refusing to face these reasons, America and its allies risks alienating every single militant Muslim in the world, little by little. Why are the real reasons behind terrorism so rarely discussed?
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
I think this will answer your questions effectively.
I'll give the short version:
There is only one way to 100% remove all information from a hard drive. Immolate it in fires exceeding 750 degrees Celcius for more than 30 minutes. This causes the magnetic iron in the platters to lose their magnetic properties and "forget" what was written on them.
Otherwise there is a way to recover the information after destruction by any other method that is easily within reach of authorities.
Although previously it was considered "safe" to overwrite the drive with 10, 20, or 30 passes of pseudo-random numbers, the fact is that the ability to recover data from more and more deeply overwritten data improves constantly and the only limiting factor is money. Even this does not truly erase all information, either, as after so many rewrites a sector will become "bad" and the drive will automatically remap that sector to a fresh one and discontinue writing over the one flagged bad. The problem is bad sector is completely readable and may have been written over by significantly fewer passes or even none at all if it failed before the drive wipe. The equipment needed to do this costs in the thousands and is at the disposal of any local police station in the developed world.
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.
To answer your original question, authorities will go as far as they need to go within the limits of their funding. The CIA/NSA certainly posesses the ability to look back as far as they want to go back short of the drive being demagnetized by flames. The question is whether the taxpayer thinks the need is important enough to warrant that expense.
Would they use an electron microscope to see investigate Joe Sixpack's computer when he's under investigation for tax fraud on $100,000? Maybe not, but they will probably take a stab at it. Would they use it to unearth files from a serial killer's computer? Possibly. The equipment is a fixed cost and the experts are paid on salary anyway. Just send it to the FBI crime lab and have at it. Would they use it to investigate the personal computer of Osama bin Laden? Oh you better bet they would. They'll go all the way back to the original hard drive manufacturing quality assurance test writes. They spent a couple hundred billion so far, a few hundred million on this computer would probably be money well spent.
Terrorists kill 4000 in order to launch a war that they can feed off. If Western civil society had simply condemned the act, given the Taliban 30 days to deliver the criminals and been very careful to not kill a single innocent civilian, Al Quaeda would have been ostracised by their own support base. By launching two wars against "terror", 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.
/me expects to be burnt for saying this but it must be said.
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.
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... it does not matter how "evil" the men with guns are. 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.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
The UN imposes all sorts of penalties on all those who contradict its religion. It issues documents and statements that openly contradict Islamic belief, such as the International Declaration for Human Rights, considering all religions are equal, and considering that the destruction of the statues constitutes a crime ...
It's interesting that I had a lively debate during lunch a few days back with a colleague about religions and what they mean in the modern world. Mind you, a healthy unbiased debate, not an argument.
I happened to mention that I think that all religions are equal, atleast at a higher level (as in if you ignore the minor details like forms of worship, etc) and that I think that they were created with a common goal of imposing "morality" and the "good" way of life back when law and order were difficult to maintain. The fear of God was a common deterrant to "bad" or "immoral" behavior.
I agree that many people find this view in contrast to the traditional beliefs of religions being God's word, but I just put forth the point since this was a debate, and I wanted to hear his opinion on it.
What I found troubling was that his *main* disagreement with what I said was the former part - the part about "all religions being equal" in the long run or from a high level. He (being a fundamentalist Christian) was totally revolted by the idea that I would say that the belief that "God is One" is the same as believing in the "Trinity". I tried explaining that those are exactly the sort of differences that people look at (in addition to form of worship etc) to argue against the inferiority of other religions, when it doesn't really matter, since all of them teach us to pray and have faith, and behave in a "good" way.
Well, I didn't get through, and the next day, he presented me a book (which I found quite outrageous) published by a campus Church group explaining why "religions are different" and how "they'll all find salvation at the feet of Christ". How can you hope to write a so called unbiased book, if your conclusion is that they'll be "Saved" only if they follow Christianity?.
Anyway, the point which I had wanted to make is that there are a *surprisingly* large number of people who refuse to believe that the best service to their religion that they can probably do is to increase tolerance towards other religions rather than denounce them and try to proselytize the masses under the guise of "saving them". I've personally seen Christian, as well as Muslim missionaries and other entities offer food/clothing and money to poorer people in Africa etc so as to convert them to their religions, *all* the while preaching that they won't be saved otherwise.
So ANY religious fundamentalism is bad, not JUST Islamic fundamentalism or Christian fundamentalism, or fundamentalism under the guise of any other religion. Hey, if you want to believe strongly in something, you're free to do so, but don't try to change my thinking or impose it upon me.
Sorry for the rant.
FROM: Ali '1st Thief" Baba
TO : Osama 'Yo Mama' bin Laden
Subject: Training
Oh! Supreme one! We are in the midst of training our latest round of recruits to service in the holy Jihad against the Infidels! We are proud to announce that shortly we shall have the capacity to completely undermine the ability of the Infidel Armies to wage war effectively:
1) It has come to our attention that many of the Infidels train for war electronically, using common-off-the-shelf games that we can obtain in various Indonesian markets for less than $1 per computer. These games are extremely popular within the Infidel youth community. "Operation Wall-Hack" is my proposal to train our operatives to use techniques frowned up by their youth community, although they are the same to create these tools, to produce a formidable, unbeatable force of Counter Strike experts. God willing, we will demoralize the youth of the Infidels, and they shall throw themselves in front of their parent's Four Wheeled Drive vehicles. Praise Allah!
2) Our operatives have discovered that Email is the #1 method of communication within the Infidel community. Our operatives have discovered on a secret, underground website called "Slashdot" that "Spam" is a growing problem that cripples the Infidel's ability to successfully utilize this medium. Through divine inspiration from Allah, I have come up with "Operation SPAM", where we will open up full time spam mailing facilities in the countries that still welcome us and we will flood the mail servers of the world with useless junk! Infidel Economies will grind to a standstill! Office workers will gnash their teeth, System Administrators will pull their hair from the roots and staple their eyes shut from the flood of junk email! I propose that we invest $499 for a server from the Infidel company Dell to begin investigating this immediately.
3. The Infidels have concocted a curious form of support for their technology. They utilize large numbers of people to man telephone stations that attempt to answer technical questions that customers of these technology companies may have in the repair, maintainence, and usage of their machines. I propose "Operation OutSource" to your holiness, to aid in our fight against the Infidels! We shall open up telephone support centers in our friendly nations and underbid the Indians to gain the business of giant Infidel corporations and provide substandard support to the Infidel industry! The Infidel productivity levels will grind to nothing! And they will PAY us for the privilege! If you are concerned that our lack of technology infrastructure and education will prevent us from providing adequate levels of support for these companies, do not fear. The current support providers don't know anything about computers, either! The hapless users will throw themselves off of their Infidel skyscrapers in madness, Allah Willing! Praise Allah!
4) We have learned a new codespeak for our communications. It is called "L33t Sp34k" and is considered to be one of the strongest encryption codes ever produced when combined with GNUPG (I am sorry to hear of your confusion regarding this product, did you read the man pages?). I highly recommend that we teach this method to all of our agents in the field.
As you can see, your Supremacy, we have the potential to completely revolutionize the way "The War" is fought. Allah willing, we shall overcome the Infidels and regain control of Palestine! Praise Allah!
-Ali Baba
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
"This was the man who that December would take $1,100 from me in exchange for two of al-Qaeda's most valuable computers--a 40-gigabyte IBM desktop and a Compaq laptop. He had stolen them from al-Qaeda's central office in Kabul on November 12, the night before the city fell to the Northern Alliance. He wanted the money, he said, so that he could travel to the United States and meet some American girls." :D
The dude has his priorities straight, that's for sure.
Dear fellow terrorist,
MY NAME IS OSAMA bin LADIn. MY FATHER WAS AN OIL PRINCE in the Saudi Empire and managed to stash $30 Million US in a securities bank. I am writing to you because I need a foreign terrorist to helP me GET THE Money out of the country......