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FBI Foils Attack by Monitoring Chat Rooms
An anonymous reader writes "A planned terrorist attack on New York City was reportedly foiled by FBI agents who monitored chat rooms frequented by extremists. Lebanese authorities captured an Al Qaeda member who confessed to the plot, and stated that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had pledged financial and other support for the operation. Although the planning for the operation was not far along, according to U.S. officials, they had already been monitoring the plot for a year." From the article: "A government official with knowledge of the investigation said the alleged plot did focus on New York's transport system, but did not target the Holland Tunnel. New York senator Charles Schumer said: 'This is one instance where intelligence was on top of its game and discovered the plot when it was just in the talking phase.' The Holland Tunnel is protected not just by bedrock, but also by concrete and cast-iron steel. One counter-terrorism source told the Daily News it was doubtful a plot to blow it up would be feasible, saying huge amounts of explosives and a detailed knowledge of blast effect would be necessary."
But please note that as the elections of 2006 get closer --- we are being bombarded with more and more of these "attempted attacks" - just like that one in Liberty City section of Miami (you know, the one where those street punks didn't even have enough money for busfare to get to North Miami...).
So let me get this straight, Canada's CT Intel busts like half a dozen terrorists before they do anything bad and America tells us our borders aren't secure enough and that we suck. America's CT intel klines a chat group and are commended for a job well done. Dare I ask, WTF?
disclaimer: I've been known to store numbers in my ass for which to dig out when quantities are required.
We cooked up one of those to look for some of our IP's / hostnames on undernet. Its really, really easy to code, the trick is keeping your bot connected, and not bringing a DOS attack on yourself by trying to monitor for eminent DOS attacks.
.. and I'm beginning to think .. yeah, well the truth is stranger than fiction. I find it easier to believe a few dumbasses were trying to cook something up in open chat (something incredibly stupid at that) than the FBI is drumming up successes for an upcoming election.
:)
So you really need like 20 or 30 of them, and a wide range of class C IP's that aren't swip'ed to you.
But yeah, quite easy to do. We even had one watching Yahoo rooms with a skinny text / Linux client for Y! chats, when the user rooms still existed.
After a few months it was really obvious that trying to monitor rooms to anticpate hassles caused more hassles than we were preventing.
But for something like the FBI would use it for, I guess its worth the hassles.
Really and honestly, I'm glad they do it. I only bitch when they cross the line of what I would consider to be a reasonable expectation of privacy. Eavesdropping on an open chat is much different than broad logging and analysis of bank transactions, phone conversations, etc.
I think (lately) anyway, they're realizing the latter is causing more hassles than it prevents.
I was thinking 'now this was obviously staged' when reading TFA, but then I thought about how stupid the plot uncovered was
So - good catch