'Motherlode' of Data Seized At Bin Laden Compound

itwbennett writes "The raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan Sunday also turned up an 'intelligence harvest' of computer-based data that was described by an anonymous government source as 'the motherlode of intelligence.' The data is being sifted through at a secret site in Afghanistan. An unnamed official was quoted by Politico as saying: 'Hundreds of people are going through it now. It's going to be great even if only 10 percent of it is actionable. They cleaned it out. Can you imagine what's on Osama bin Laden's hard drive?'"

Comments

My bet

[Anonymous Coward]

Goat porn

Re:My bet

[Opportunist]

Well, it sure is a big asshole, so...

They found terrorist porn

[countertrolling]

Lots of snuff films

Truecrypt

[afidel]

I would imagine a big old truecrypt partition, though perhaps he didn't encrypt things for some reason?

Re:Truecrypt

[bjdevil66]

If he didn't encrypt his HDD and it burns terrorists everywhere, the smart terrorists in the future won't make the same mistake. This is probably a one-time "motherlode" of intel...

Re:Truecrypt

[TheRaven64]

Suicide bombers rarely make the same mistakes twice.

Re:Truecrypt

[alta]

or apple could tap the unused power of all the iDevices connected to the internet and give it to you in real time.

Re:Truecrypt

[tripleevenfall]

He further assumes that Truecrypt does not provide a backdoor to NSA for this in the first place.

Re:Truecrypt

[tripleevenfall]

Hopefully (if it were encrypted and we cracked it), we would continue to put out statements in the media that we couldn't crack it...

(while we were kicking doors at his safehouses and rounding up the remainder of his minions around the world)

Re:Truecrypt

[dougmc]

Truecrypt is open source. No, I haven't looked at it myself, but it only takes one person to rat such a thing out.

Encryption is hard. Really hard to do right.

The NSA can hire the best. It's entirely possible that they (or some other comparable agency) hired somebody to inject a weakness into it's algorithms that would only be noticed in a code audit by somebody extremely skilled in the art. I'm not saying there's a backdoor such as "if you == NSA, decrypt everything!" but there may be something that greatly restricts the key combination that must be tested to crack it or something.

If you're in a situation that the authorities would give anything to get access to your encrypted data, a lot of paranoia is a very healthy thing.

I do agree that I'd trust open source code more than closed source code in this regard, but it's certainly possible for open source code to have backdoors or weaknesses -- intentional or accidental -- and for nobody to notice it for a long time.

Re:Truecrypt

[Hultis]

Even if you somehow synchronized all the hardware in the world with no overhead you wouldn't be able to crack 4096 bits RSA within reasonable time. Unless the NSA has some algorithms they haven't told the world about (frankly it wouldn't be all too surprising) it's not going to happen. However, I doubt Bin Laden used such crazy encryption.

Re:Truecrypt

[Cytotoxic]

Hopefully (if it were encrypted and we cracked it), we would continue to put out statements in the media that we couldn't crack it...

(while we were kicking doors at his safehouses and rounding up the remainder of his minions around the world)

Agreed! Didn't we learn anything from the whole "we tracked him by his cell phone" braggadocio fiasco? STFU about your intel sources. Sheesh....

Re:Truecrypt

[CharlyFoxtrot]

I would imagine a big old truecrypt partition, though perhaps he didn't encrypt things for some reason?

The guy was 54 and the latter part of those years was spent in some pretty remote areas. I doubt he had much expertise in computer security. They probably relied much more on physical security, i.e. being to blow all their stuff up if the shit hit the fan (or their stuff going up in same bombing raid as them.)

Re:Truecrypt

[SnarfQuest]

You mean, like not handling daylight savings time correctly, thus blowing themselves up an hour early? (Yup, this did happen).

Re:Truecrypt

[GreenTom]

I think the $0.10 bullet made the $5 wrench unworkable.

Re:Truecrypt

[ScentCone]

Didn't we learn anything from the whole "we tracked him by his cell phone" braggadocio fiasco?

That wasn't bragging. That was leaking, meant to do political damage to the Bush administration.

Re:Truecrypt

[CFTM]

My guess is there is rhyme and reason to why they're making this announcement so public Say what you will about the bureaucrats who run these bureaus but they understand the relationships you described above and these are not idle statements.

Most individuals, upon completing a university education should have been exposed to Sun Tzu's "Art of War" and the wisdom on prevailing in conflicts explored in that text has stood 5,000 years of scrutiny. So what I'm saying is, don't underestimate this action. Our politicians are stupid because they pander to groups, thereby inducing the lowest common denominator. They often make the bureaucrats look stupid with their double-talk and ineptitudes, but perception is rarely reality.

Ideologically you may disagree with these people, but make no mistake about it, this was planned action and not a mere oversight.

Re:Truecrypt

[igb]

For example, if someone modified the code to completely break the entropy generation in a widely used cryptography library in a major Linux distribution, with the effect that you only had to search 32768 possibilities in order break "4096 bit" cryptography, the benefit of open source is that it would be spotted immediately. No, wait... One interpretation of that disaster is that people who were completely unqualified to work on crypto code made a stupid mistake. Another is that people who were most certainly qualified to work on crypto code made an excellent move for the security services.

Re:Truecrypt

[mangu]

Do you know why there are so few competent suicide bombers?

Because only those who flunk their exams graduate from the training.

Re:Truecrypt

[LWATCDR]

You also assume that they didn't use a weak password. You would be shocked how many really smart people don't know the difference between a week and a strong password.
Also I would bet that the NSA has at least the computing power of a Cray Jaguar or two or three to throw at this. With that much power anything but a very long and totally random string of characters would probably be too weak.

Re:Truecrypt

[PCM2]

While I think the idea of the NSA putting a backdoor into an open source project is pure tin-foil hat territory

Let me get this straight: You think the idea that one of the nation's most secretive intelligence agencies would be doing something in secret that allows them to gain intelligence is "tin-foil hat territory"? How do you know which contributors to TrueCrypt are working for the NSA? How could you ever know?

Re:Truecrypt

[lgw]

The NSA has told the world to stop using product-of-prime-numbers based asymmetric encryption. However, TrueCrypt uses symmetric encryption, so that's secure against a brute-force attack ... well, except the sort of brute force attack where a Navy SEAL team kicks down your door and shoots you in the face while your computer is running with the TrueCrypt volume mounted - then it's easy. Hooah!

Re:Truecrypt

[powerlord]

I would imagine a big old truecrypt partition, though perhaps he didn't encrypt things for some reason?

The guy was 54 and the latter part of those years was spent in some pretty remote areas. I doubt he had much expertise in computer security. They probably relied much more on physical security, i.e. being to blow all their stuff up if the shit hit the fan (or their stuff going up in same bombing raid as them.)

Not to mention, he escaped from the Afghan caves and has been successfully hiding from authorities for the better part of 6 years. That might have helped make him more careless in security matters ( such as "They couldn't catch me! Ha!" or "They missed me once, and haven't been able to find the backside of their own hands since my Pakistani colleagues have been feeding them shit for intelligence").

Re:Truecrypt

[HanClinto]

I know you're speaking in jest, but it's a bit more chilling to consider how many of them (such as the 9/11 suicide hijackers) had college degrees -- they were no flunkies.

Re:Truecrypt

[Shotgun]

Either that, or it is a commentary on the value of a college degree.

Just sayin'.

Re:Truecrypt

[compro01]

10s of years? You have no sense of scale.

The combined Rpeak of the top 10 supercomputers is about 19 teraFLOPS, let's assume that equals to about 40 trillion integer operations per second.

Let's use 128-bit AES, so there's 2^128 possible keys.

just to increment through all those keys, never mind checking them, would require those systems for 269,000,000,000,000,000 years. While you'd probably find the right key in about half that time, it will still be long after the last stars go cold and dark.

Each bit you add to the key length doubles the keyspace. 56-bit DES is trivial to crack with specialized hardware, 128-bit is all but impossible. And never mind 256-bit.

Re:Truecrypt

[hey!]

It just strikes me as strange that people who would be paranoid enough to encrypt their [probably completely banal and uninteresting] data, when told that their encryption might not actually prevent the world's top spies from accessing said data, would brush off the idea as simple paranoia. Make up your mind, folks: Are you paranoid or aren't you?

I agree. It would be wise to assume that even if the NSA doesn't have the equivalent of a back door, they could well exploit weakness in the software, especially if the user gets just a tiny bit sloppy and lets his paranoia slip just a bit (e.g. leaving plaintext in the hibernate file).

What is interesting is to take this line of reasoning back to the apparent claim that our analysts are already going to town on the stuff they picked up in the Waziristan Mansion. Either (a) those claims are bogus or (b) Osama didn't use any kind of encryption or (c) our crypto geeks have a way through the encryption software he used, which could either be a backdoor or a known but undisclosed weakness.

A is not so interesting and C we've beaten into a temporary coma, but B raises some interesting points.

Osama's survival for so long so champion at the art of discriminating paranoia. So why didn't he use encryption? If we assume he was acting rationally, it must be because he considered the risk of his computer falling into the hands of the enemy negligible compared to the other risks he was running. Either he got cocky, or he didn't give a damn what happened after he was out of the picture.

Re:Truecrypt

[jimbolauski]

He received a spam text that blew him up. spam kills

Re:Truecrypt

[blueg3]

I guess I mostly object to the use of "secret" as a synonym for "covert". But people seem to have the impression that it's trivially easy for the NSA to get someone to volunteer on TrueCrypt, have them modify the cryptography, and subtlety insert a weakness that goes unnoticed by everyone else. You can't just show up and make a few commits -- what sort of managers of a crypto product would allow that?

But yes, you could *covertly* make changes to TrueCrypt that result in a security flaw, but you can't really do it *secretly*, since all your changes have to be made public for them to be included in the open-source project.

These days, thought, that'd be an odd thing for the NSA to do. Strong encryption is easy to come by these days. To have a reasonable shot at accessing encrypted data, you'd need to affect a lot of projects or have put a weakness into AES itself. But adding weaknesses to products that the US Government intends to use (like AES) is dangerous, because the NSA isn't the only crypto game in town any more. It's so much more common for people to make security practice mistakes (like writing down the password and storing it near the encrypted data, or even using an encrypted container inside a non-encrypted system disk) that you're in a much better position if you keep the encryption products strong and attack their non-encryption security practices.

Re:Truecrypt

[PCM2]

Osama's survival for so long so champion at the art of discriminating paranoia. So why didn't he use encryption? If we assume he was acting rationally, it must be because he considered the risk of his computer falling into the hands of the enemy negligible compared to the other risks he was running. Either he got cocky, or he didn't give a damn what happened after he was out of the picture.

It's possible. One rule of thumb that's been practiced by revolutionary cells for years is: Keep quiet for 24 hours. They will torture you. Endure the torture. Do everything within your power to tell them nothing... for 24 hours. Then talk. After 24 hours, tell them anything they want to hear. Tell them everything. It won't matter, because you're just one guy, and after 24 hours, nothing in your head will be of any real use to them anymore.

Re:Truecrypt

[N0Man74]

Either that, or it is a commentary on the value of a college degree.

Just sayin'.

People seem to think that suicide bombers are either idiots, complete nutjobs, or hate-filled extremists. I think the truth is more complicated than that.

I've heard stories about how at least some these guys are recruited. It often involves deceit, manipulation and heavy cohesion. They end up getting mixed up with the wrong people (and it can start seemingly innocently and naively). By the end, they end up being threatened or blackmailed, and put in a position where they feel like if they don't do it, they may bring danger or shame to family and loved ones.

I know it's no consolation to their victims, and by no means does it justify their actions, but some of these guys are victims too.

Re:Truecrypt

[lennier]

Meanwhile, bullets are one trick ponies.

True, but it's a really impressive trick.

Re:Truecrypt

[blair1q]

The competent ones build the bombs and recruit the suicide bombers to act as mere mules.

It's not cost-effective to train someone to select targets and build and arm bombs, and then blow them up.

Re:Truecrypt

[Opportunist]

Erh... what gives you the idea that there's anyone (in power) that wants to END that war? How do you plan to justify military spending without an enemy?

Re:Truecrypt

[Jeremi]

This makes encryption a very useful tool, as the password will literally die with you.

On the other hand, if there's anyone who can crack the encryption without the password, it's probably the US government. Perhaps the common encryption methods are mathematically strong enough to withstand money-is-no-object brute-force, and perhaps the implementations don't have any unpublicized weaknesses (or secret back doors) ... but I wouldn't want to bet my evil terrorism network on that.

Re:Porn?

[Lunix Nutcase]

Yeah, lots of pictures sexy...ankles!!

Unfortunately...

[MetalliQaZ]

... he wasn't actively commanding his organization since going into hiding. However I would hope that his data contains names of most of the AQ leadership, so perhaps some new names will come to light. It would be nice if the location of his #2 was discovered and exploited.

Re:Unfortunately...

[brainboyz]

Imagine the shitstorm if several names turn up from the recently re-established governments.

I think he cheated

[SuperCharlie]

Nobody has a score that low on minesweeper...

Can you imagine what's on Osama's hard drive?

[Vinegar Joe]

Obama's real birth certificate?

Ten Most Wanted

[dasdrewid]

He was on the FBI's "10 Most Wanted" list, right?

Yeah, I'm going with porn.

Wikileaks

[goombah99]

I would imagine a big old truecrypt partition, though perhaps he didn't encrypt things for some reason?

Well I'm reading through the files from bin laden's drives that were posted on wikileaks an hour ago and it looks like they he used steganography based on goat porn.

Re:Umm

[chill]

Encryption only really works if you do it right, every time. Screw up only once, and you could leave enough crumbs to compromise it all.

He's been holed up in that place for 6 years now, with no one even coming close. Time for him to get comfortable and slipshod. The odds of him not slipping up at all during that time are slim.

Maybe it is all encrypted, or maybe there are enough clues left around to provide some real, useful information.

Besides, the real question isn't what is on there. It is who in the various governments and industry are quaking in their boots thinking THEY may be on a list identifying them as supporters.

It's Obvious.

[Zarjazz]

Angry Birds

RIAA cease-and-desist letters

[enaso1970]

In the end, sharing that Black Eyed Peas song came back to haunt him much more than leading a worldwide terrorist movement.

Disappear

[More Trouble]

If I thought I'd appear in any of that data, I'd already have disappeared.

Re:Disappear

[chemicaldave]

It could very well be misinformation to throw them off their game. There might be no intelligence at all, but it doesn't hurt to say we have some.

And they found ...

[gfreeman]

22 million email addresses in a file marked "sony.dat"

Sticky Note

[medv4380]

Did they remember to grab the sticky note with the 128 bit key written down?

Re:Sticky Note

[Maxo-Texas]

So insightful.

As I sit here looking at the note with mine I had to write after I was required to change my password about 5 times in 30 days and the last change entirely invalidated my existing secure scheme.

Re:Umm

[The Grim Reefer2]

Encryption only really works if you do it right, every time. Screw up only once, and you could leave enough crumbs to compromise it all.

We're talking about the NSA getting this drive. So by doing it right you mean everything's encrypted and in the event of a raid the drive is melted with thermite, mixed with neodymium magnet dust, placed in a 5T magnetic field, stepped on by five elephants, mixed into bird food and fed to a flock of >100 migratory birds.

Re:Umm

[Anrego]

This is, this is just the kind of ultra important stuff where some is _actually_ going to use obscene amounts of processing power and analysis if required to get access to the data.

Encryption is a deterant.. 99% of the time the effort required to break said encryption is out of imagination for the value of the data... in this rare case, all the resources of the US military and possibly even other governments are available for use. They'd analyse every IC in the machine and put entire server farms to work on it to get the key.. unless he was very good with his computing practices... they'd get their data.

It could be a trap

[davidwr]

If he's smart he would've not only encrypted everything but most of the information would be intentionally misleading or low-value, making whoever got it not only have to work to decrypt it but to have sort out what's real and useful and what's not.

Re:It could be a trap

[Cytotoxic]

If he had foresight and a sense of humor there's a bunch of emails from Bush and Cheney saying "Thanks old buddy, us boy's from Texas really appreciate all the help..."

Re:It could be a trap

[mean pun]

He was on record as saying he thought he could bankrupt the US by dragging us into a war in the Middle East. So no, he wasn't smart, not even a little bit.

Well, the price tag of the Afghan and Iraq war is pretty staggering, and the US is in dire need of money, so he got close, didn't he?

Re:It could be a trap

[Americano]

Unfortunately, all of the bad and low-value data was in a Windows folder named "My Misleading Documents," making it pretty easy to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Re:Umm

[Surt]

And then the guys at the NSA say: hmm, interesting challenge!

Re:Sounds like a photoshop contest

[spun]

"Wait a minute, wait a minute, what did I say? Did I just say 'Radaman?' What is that? Yeah, maybe Dennis Radaman is going to punish you with his crazy hair."

the name is Osama, not bin Laden

[Creepy]

Minor annoyance - his name is Osama - bin Laden is "from Laden," not really a last name, so it's like if you were George from New York and everyone called you New York all the time.

Re:the name is Osama, not bin Laden

[jfengel]

"Bin Laden" is "of the Laden family". The "bin" is akin to the Hebrew "ben", "son of" (e.g. "Yeshua ben Yosef", "Jesus son of Joseph".) The Arab equivalent to "of" (in this context) is "al", e.g. Saddam Hussein al Tikriti, Saddam Hussein from Tikrit.

As with other patronymics (e.g. the Scottish "Mac"), it's often used as a general family name, inherited for multiple generations. Osama bin Laden's father is Muhammad bin Laden. The original "Laden" is unknown, but goes back at least a century.

So it's perfectly reasonable to call him "bin Laden". It's his family name, at least a few generations back. Confusion arises only as with every other family name, in that there are a lot of bin Ladens out there, and you'd have to use his full name to be clear. But using just his first name would be equivalent to referring to the Chancellor of Germany as "Angela" or the Prime Minister of the UK as "Gordon": it's their personal name, and rarely used alone in public discourse.

You could use it that was as a deliberate insult of over familiarity. The New York Times took the unusual step of referring to him just as "bin Laden" rather than "Mr. bin Laden", which they reserve generally for the worst of the worst.

Re:the name is Osama, not bin Laden

[plopez]

Like "Manfred von Richthofen" being called "von Richthofen"?

Re:the name is Osama, not bin Laden

[Urban Garlic]

> ...or the Prime Minister of the UK as "Gordon"...

Particularly odd, as the Prime Minister of the UK has been David Cameron for a year or so...

Re:the name is Osama, not bin Laden

[jfengel]

Give me five minutes and then check Wikipedia.

(Of all the stupid mistakes to make...)

Re:the name is Osama, not bin Laden

[Shrike82]

But using just his first name would be equivalent to referring to the ... Prime Minister of the UK as "Gordon":

That'd be even worse since his name is David.

never

[circletimessquare]

wikileaks, in regard to the big pfc manning data dump, was a one time event only

the huge size of sensitive info depended upon a government policy that encouraged information sharing between departments. this allowed pfc manning to get access to the data

so now, due to the wikileaks embarrassment, we have government departments adjusting their policies, discouraging information sharing and keeping their info segregated

that's a shame, because the more open sharing policy was a result of 9/11, which showed that departments not sharing data contributed to the intelligence failure that allowed 9/11 to happen

so, thanks to wikileaks leading to a decrease in information sharing between departments, maybe we'll have another intelligence failure that will lead to another 9/11

isn't wikileaks wonderful?

i know a lot of teenagers and adults with immature teenaged mentalities thinks government secrets are pure evil, but guess what: when it comes to fighting terrorism, they are absolutely necessary. for example: do you think bin laden would be alive or dead right now if the intel that led to him were more widely available?

people really have to grow up and understand that government secrets are actually a good thing. all teenaged idealism to the contrary

i'm sure wikileaks will find a few more government info gems. and i actually welcome wikileaks in the realm of corporate intel and nonmilitary government secrets. but when it comes to terrorism intel, wikileaks is a disaster, and may even contribute to the next terrorist attack succeeding

Re:never

[JaredOfEuropa]

As I recall, Wikileaks leaked very little counterterrorism intel. Most of it was governmental and corporate shenanigans. So, governments do underhanded deals that they have absolutely no business doing, and departments clam up on info sharing because governments want to keep those shady deals (not counterterrorism intel) a secret from the general public, and you're blaming Wikileaks for the next terrorist strike? Nice...

Re:never

[IamTheRealMike]

Governments don't actually face a choice between "share info and have leaks" or "don't share info and don't". That's a false dichotomy.

Leaks tend to happen when things are being covered up that should not be covered up. Leakers take huge risks, as the sad case of Mannings treatment shows. They don't tend to do it for shits and giggles, or because of some anarchic belief that all secrets are bad. In the case of the Manning dumps he did it because he thought there were a lot of scandals and other things being wrongly suppressed .... and he was right!

So we can see there's a third option, which is, don't cover up large numbers of scandals. Instead when you screw up, admit it, and ensure everyone can see the measures to take to prevent repeat incidents. There are plenty of organizations that do this. The US Govt is not one of them.

Re:never

[mywhitewolf]

how do you suggest manning handle leaking out the corruption in government then?

manning released what equates to "insider trading" to the "stakeholders", the government belongs to the people and is accountable to them, not the other way around. not all secrets should be revealed, but I'm yet to find one that shouldn't have due to the negative repercussions of the release. no one has died due to the release (OBL is speculation at best) yet how many people have died from keeping the information secret?

A selfish man who had others die for him.

[MarkvW]

A selfish man who had others die for him is not likely to be overmuch careful about protecting the people who remain alive after he is dead.

I bet he was really sloppy and undisciplined.

Re:A selfish man who had others die for him.

[Que914]

A selfish man who had others die for him

That's kind of a trite and glib statement, and one we've heard a lot. When I was in the military I heard people say quite often "If Osama thinks strapping a bomb to your chest to kill infidels is such a good idea, why doesn't he do it?" The answer to that is simply, the same reason George W. Bush didn't grab an M-16 and head to Fallujah.

Re:A selfish man who had others die for him.

[Anonymous Coward]

the same reason George W. Bush didn't grab an M-16 and head to Fallujah.

He got an exemption thanks to his dad?

Oh wait, wrong war.

Re:A selfish man who had others die for him.

[Anonymous Coward]

A selfish man who had others die for him is not likely to be overmuch careful about protecting the people who remain alive after he is dead.

I bet he was really sloppy and undisciplined.

Yeah, that must be why he evaded the most powerful nation in the world for 10 fucking years... Sloppiness and lack of discipline.

I don't agree with what he did. I think he was an 'evil' man. That being said, so are most of the political leaders in the USA. The biggest difference is, they try to hide it, while OBL was honest about his intentions.

The problem I have with your statement is, you're doing what so many Americans do best. You falsely attribute negative qualities to someone you don't like, as if your insulting them somehow does good. Your statement is FAR more accurate if aimed at American politicians, and it's those very idiots who teach people to use the foolish tactics your comment is written with.

Don't forget, your logic regarding a leader sending suicide bombers can be applied to the leaders of almost any country who send their soldiers to war.

Re:Umm

[zeptic]

Is that African or European swallows?

Re:Porn?

[countertrolling]

Then you can bet they won't have any pictures of Hillary's...

Re:Porn?

[elrous0]

You joke, but I bet if they did find porn, it would do more to hurt his reputation among the Koran-thumpers than killing scores of innocent civilians.

It's all about the money...

[dtjohnson]

Osama Bin Laden's organization needed a LOT of money to keep going. Money to pay for food and housing for all of the thousands of followers who are not actually working or doing anything useful. Money for travel, equipment, supplies, bribes, etc. Those hard drives will probably show exactly WHO was supporting these terrorists. Which banks were laundering money money donations to make it available to Osama Bin Laden? Maybe JPMorgan Chase was Osama's banker like they were Bernie Madoff's banker. Who was issuing them credit cards? Which foreign governments were enabling them to travel by issuing passports, visas, and other documents? The Osama Bin Laden people were very sophisticated in how they approached their terrorist activities...that was OBL's 'innovation'...and now it may all come unraveled. There are plenty of young men with rifles running around the Afghanistan hills who hate the West...or what little they know of it...but that does not make them into terrorists capable of carrying out a sophisticated act of terror in another country. That OBL data may help ID a few new faces but mostly it will be the leads to the money trail that will bring the global terror activities to an end.

Re:Where's wiki-leaks?

[Coren22]

Um...congress did declare war...

Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq
Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists

Or do you believe that an Authorization for the Use of Military Force isn't equivalent to a Declaration of War?

Re:Assuming does...

[blueg3]

Probably from TFA.

Title: "Reports: Computers seized at bin Laden compound"
Subtitle: "U.S. authorities removed hard drives, CDs, DVDs, USB sticks in what is described as a 'motherlode' of data"

I'm guessing that maybe the bin Laden compound had computers, hard drives, CDs, DVDs, and USB sticks, which U. S. authorities seized. But that's just my uninformed guess.

Re:Sounds like a photoshop contest

[GeckoAddict]

There is NO way I'm going to click any link in this thread at work...

Re:Truecrypt--Not "if", but "when."

[Americano]

This presumes that we're not already watching those suspected safehouses and banking accounts, and won't also make not of a sudden flurry of activity hours after it was announced that Osama Bin Laden was dead. If they suspect that we will get access to it sooner or later, then they have to make their changes quickly. If you suddenly see 30 men with RPGs and AK-47's rushing out of a suspected safehouse carrying dozens of crates labeled "Caution: High Explosive!", well... perhaps those guys are worth watching regardless of whether or not we have confirmation that their names & location are on that encrypted volume.

Re:It's all about the money - NOT

[Animats]

Osama Bin Laden's organization needed a LOT of money to keep going.

Not really. The 9/11 attack only cost about $200,000 to execute. Al-Queda was never that big. In recent years it's been more of a loose coordinating group for various militant factions. In its best years, Al-Queda raised maybe $30 million. That decreased as the US found ways to cut off its funding sources.

Re:Truecrypt--Not "if", but "when."

[MarkvW]

You are totally right. The leaking of the "treasure trove of intel" is definitely designed to motivate flight behavior.

Re:Osama Missed Wikileaks Tweet Of Location?

[MakinBacon]

on or near April 25, 2011.

Link doesn't say that anybody actually knew he was there, just that US troops were in the neighborhood.

Re:Osama Missed Wikileaks Tweet Of Location?

[wjousts]

He boasted about all the material he leaked.

Re:Porn?

[jimbolauski]

Then you can bet they won't have any pictures of Hillary's...

I'm sure they have panoramic cameras that can handle the job.

Re:Sounds like a photoshop contest

[cbiltcliffe]

From page source:

<title>
        YouTube
                - Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up
    </title>

The perl GET command is a wonderful thing.

Honestly, I was expecting goatse. I never figured Osama was a Rick Astley fan...