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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."
"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.
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.
Dubya put it best:
"They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
Just a comment to all. THe date on the e-mail, if true, about chemical weapons is April 15, 1999. Mr. Clinton was in office. The big one hit on Mr. Bush's watch. So the next time someone says George Bush did this or Bill Clinton did that and it made the situation worse, remember this.
The terrorists don't give a damn about who's in office. They have been planning all this for many years. Bush or Kerry is irrelevant in the long-term as long as whomever is elected find a permanent solution to this one way or another.
nos laetus epulor qui would domito nos
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.
It's that fact that makes this era so dangerous, as it leading to laws being passed to restrict information and freedoms. :-(
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
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.
The quote is rather amusing.
However, it looses it's school-yard amusement when placed in it full context
"They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.We must never stop thinking about how best to defend our country. We must always be forward-thinking"
Basically.. Bush is saying that in order to prepare for an attack against a vulnerability we must fist identify that very vulnerability ourselves.
I do this all the time when securing my networks and computer - I ask my self "how would I attack my own system."
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
"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?